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THE CHANGING CHINESE 



THE 
CHANGING CHINESE 



THE CONFLICT OF ORIENTAL AND 
WESTERN CULTURES IN CHINA 



BY 

EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS, Ph.D., LL.D. 

PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN 

AUTHOR OF "SOCIAL CONTROL," "FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIOLOGY," 

"SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY," ETC. 




:! %S&&>rfs&44£ 



NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

1911 



-> 






Copyright, 1911, by 

The Century Co. 

Copyright, 1911, by The Ridgway Company 



Published, October, 1911 



*V 



©CI.A2 078G0 
I 




The Cliff: of the Thousand Gods, on the Kialing 
River in North Szechuan 



TO 
DR. AMOS P. WILDER 

AMERICAN CONSUL GENERAL AT SHANGHAI 

FRIEND OF THE CHANGING CHINESE 

AND ELOQUENT 'INTERPRETER TO THEM 

OF THE BEST AMERICANISM 

THIS BOOK 

IS DEDICATED 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

China to the Ranging Ete 3 

Medieval aspect of the cities — Streets, water supply, light- 
ing and fuel — Contrast between Chinese and Japanese in 
point of neatness — Costume, pailows and pawn-shops — 
River traffic and the riverine population — Rural ties of 
city-dwellers — Characterizing influence of the loess — Ruth- 
less destruction of the forests — Calamitous results of de- 
forestation — No hope of improvement in our time — Why 
game is so plentiful — The Great Wall — Racial contrasts 
between Northern and Southern Chinese. 

CHAPTER II 

The Race Fiber of the Chinese 33 

Selection and survival in China — Relentless elimination of 
the less fit — Testimony as to the effect upon race physique 
— Quick and sure recovery of the Chinese from grave 
wounds and surgical operations — Their comparative free- 
dom from blood poisoning, dysentery, typhoid and small- 
pox — Their bluntness of nerve — Diseases they fail to 
resist — The Chinese physique distinguished, not by a 
primitive vitality, but by specific immunities from the 
poisons of congested life — Their toleration of noxious 
microbes unique and not likely to be developed in other 
races — Military and industrial significance of the tough- 
ness of the Chinese. 

CHAPTER III 

The Race Mind of the Chinese 51 

The Chinese reflective rather than impulsive — Their re- 
sponse to stimuli slow but strong and persistent — Their 
self-control, steadiness and reliability — Conservatism not 
a race trait, but a by-product of their social history — 
Cause of the early arrest of their cultural development — 
Prospect of the early release of the Chinese intellect 
from the spell of the past — Comparative ability of the 



viii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

yellow race and the white — Naturalness and likableness 
of the Chinese — Their sense of humor, politeness and re- 
spect for age — Why their old men are so often attractive 
— Mere borrowing cannot put them abreast of the West; 
they must establish a new relation between population 
and opportunities and this will take time. 



CHAPTER IV 

The Struggle for Existence in China 70 

Extraordinary utilization of the soil — Aerial tillage — 
Made fields — Why the cities are scavenged for nothing — 
Queer foods — Strange gleanings and pilferings — Men kill- 
ing themselves by toil — Incredible poverty of the masses 
— Absence of comfort — Cheapening of human life — Why 
the Chinese are so cohesive and clannish — Why so utili- 
tarian — No cause for such a struggle for existence save 
over-population — How ancestor worship whets the desire 
for large families — Marriage early and universal — Pro- 
creative recklessness and the appalling infant mortality 
resulting therefrom — Famines and migrations — The Chi- 
nese death-rate will be brought down sooner than the 
birth-rate — Prospect of extreme overcrowding and out- 
thrust — Chinese emigration likely to become a world 
question. 

CHAPTER V 

The Industrial Future of China 112 

The military "yellow peril" a bogey — Difficulty of reviv- 
ing the fighting spirit in the Chinese — The industrial 
"yellow peril" — Amazing cheapness of labor in China — 
Factories rapidly springing up — But China herself offers 
an enormous market for their products — Low wages not 
the same as low labor-cost — Not enough capital to build 
railways and also expand manufactures — How a rapa- 
cious government paralyzes the spirit of enterprise — 
Untrustworthiness of the Chinese in joint-stock under- 
takings — Nepotism and favoritism, place-holders and sine- 
curists — The problem of the foreign expert — Inefficiency 
of native management — Oriental competition will be our 
grandchildren's problem. 

CHAPTER VI 

The Grapple With the Opium Evil 139 

Growth and extent of the luxury-use of opium — Why the 
opium pipe is so seductive to the Chinese — Why society 
has been so slow to react against the vice — Motive be- 



CONTENTS ix 

PAGE 

hind the Anti-Opium Edict — Provisions of the Edict — 
Economic difficulties in the way of suppressing opium- 
growing — Tragic incidents of the fight on the poppy — 
Practical results of the campaign — Testing the mandarins 
for smoking — Increasing restrictions on the sale and use 
of opium — The Foochow policy — The impression on public 
opinion and current moral standards — The agreement 
with England — The end of opium in sight — Lessons from 
China's experience. 

CHAPTER VII 

Unbinding the Women of China 174 

Extent, motives and consequences of foot-binding — The 
missionaries initiate the fight against the custom — Work 
of the Natural-Foot Society — Support from the Empress 
Dowager — Progress of the reform in the upper classes — 
Foot-binding still wide-spread and will die out but slowly. 
Inferior position of the female in the family — Chinese 
opinion of woman's character — Relative value of the two 
sexes — The female exists for the sake of the male — So- 
cial intercourse organized for men — No mixed society — 
The status of the daughter in the family — Rearing mar- 
riages, child-betrothals and parental match-making — 
Heart-binding even more damaging to woman's health 
than foot-binding — The bride's subjection to her mother- 
in-law — Point of view of a Confucian — The revolt of the 
silk-reelers against marriage — Mission-school girls — Gov- 
ernment education of girls — Freer customs — "Liberty 
girls" — The effect of female emancipation upon the fu- 
ture of the Chinese. 



CHAPTER VIII 

Christianity in China 216 

Lama worship compared with practical Christianity — 
The low plane of Chinese religions — The people saturated 
with superstition — The mission force in China — How the 
Chinese explain the presence of the missionary — Cause of 
anti-missionary outbreaks — Changing attitude of the 
mandarins — Contrast of aims between British missions 
and American — New conceptions of mission work — "Rice 
Christians" — Transforming power of Christianity — What 
conversion entails — Deceptive "mass-movements" — What 
the higher classes think — Types drawn to the Christian 
ideal — The higher standing of daughter and wife among 
converts — The indirect and unseen fruits of missionary 
labor — Animus of critics — Missionary mistakes and prob- 
lems — Reaction of missionary work upon native faiths — 
Future of Christianity in China. 



x CONTENTS 

CHAPTER IX 

PAGE 

The Fab West of the Far East 260 

Chinese highways — Signal towers — Monuments — Cost of 
carriage — The currency problem — Strange aspect of the 
country — Idyllic harvesting — Havoc wrought by deforesta- 
tion — What is lost when the woods go — Missionary life 
and work — Sianfu — The Pei-lin — Religious rivalry — The 
Tartar bannermen — The new army — Itinerant harvesters 
— Fgngsiangfu — Mountaineers of West Shensi — "Eoad of 
the Golden Ox" — Highway neglect — Characterizing influ- 
ence of rice culture — The great road of North Szechuan 
— Packmen — Beauty of West-China types — Ravages of 
disease — Squalor and dreariness of life in overpeopled 
Szechuan — The Chengtu plain — Incredible productiveness 
— Manure traps — Irrigation wheels — Progressiveness of 
Chengtu — What holds the Chinese back — Why the mar- 
tial virtues vanished — The hampering ideals of the 
scholar type — How to unleash the native energy of the 
race. 

CHAPTER X 

The New Education 310 

Medievalism of Chinese thinking — Ignorance of the prin- 
ciple of efficiency — Secret of the impotence of old China 
in coping with Western nations — Characteristics of the 
old education — Motives to the introduction of the West- 
ern branches — The scope of present education in China — 
Inefficient management of the higher schools — Sinecurism 
— Poor use of the foreign teacher — The overloaded course 
of study — Errors of the Board of Education — Traits of 
the Chinese student — Indications as to his capacity — 
His lack of discipline, reliance upon mass action, and 
contempt for manual labor — His poor physique and neg- 
lect of physical training — His attitude towards sports — 
The burden of the ideographic language; efforts at sim- 
plification — The reaction of the educational revolution 
upon moral standards — The golden opportunity of the 
mission colleges. 

Index 347 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

The Cliff of the Thousand Gods, on the Kialing 

River in North Szechuan Frontispiece 

A pottery — the walls built with defective pots 5 <•-' 

A blocked path 5 

Typical ornamental gateways 10 

House-boats lining a river avenue 15 

Indian bullock in a Quangsi bullock-cart 20 

A Peking cart 20 

A half-buried gate-tower 26 

A silted-up bridge in Shansi. One of the ultimate results of 

deforestation 26 

The great wall 31 

A Canton water-front crowd 37 " 

Station platform faces 37 '-' 

The river stairs up which all the water for Chungking is borne 44 v 

Scene in the Imperial City, Peking 49 1^ 

Hovel on beach at Kiukiang. Over the door the character for 

"happiness" 49 \S~ 

A police squad in Sianfu 56 ^ 

Meeting of the first provincial assembly of the Province of 

Fokien, Foochow, October, 1909 56 '"" 

Altar, Temple of Heaven, Peking 59 

View in the Temple grounds of the Ming Tombs. Mountains 

near Peking 59 

A rustic Endymion of West China 67 ^ 

An old farmer 67 

Cave dwelling of a coal miner 76 ■ 

Perfected tillage of the valley of an affluent of the Wei River 76 '• 

Junk on the Yangtse 81 v ~ 

Fishing with cormorants 81 

What passes for a public highway 88 

A common carrier 88 

One of the three life boats that escorted us through the gorges 93 



LIST OF ILLUSTEATIONS 



PAGE 



An ancient mariner 93 ^ 

Braving the Yangtse flood. Cliff swallows' nests at Chung- 
king 100 v 

A wayside beggar 107 l/ ' 

Professional beggar dinning to make a shopkeeper contribute 107 " 

The railway police at a station 115 ' 

Chinese officers 115* 

Tracking a junk through the gorges of the Yangtse . . . 121 ^ 

Working a Yangtse junk with oar and sweep 124 v 

Cash equivalent to $3.15, weight 50 lbs. . .' . . . . . 129 £/ 

A slow freight on the Great Northern Road 129 w ' 

Weighing silver ingots in a Sianfu bank 135/ 

A protected monument at Sianfu 135 v/ 

Family and home vanishing into the opium pipe .... 144 v 

South half of the west wall of Sianfu, from the west gate . 147 

City wall and five-story pagoda, Canton 147 

Opium pipes confiscated by the Anti-Opium Society . . . 154 

Captives of the lamp and pipe 162 

Death in the lamp of the opium smoker 165 

Burning of opium pipes and other paraphernalia confiscated 

by the Foochow Anti-Opium Society (eighth time) . . 167 

An old Chinese garden at Taiku 186' 

Flower pagoda, Canton 186 

One of the south gates into the Tartar City, Peking . . . 191 17 

Temple of Five Hundred Genii, Canton 191 

Gate between two provinces in West China 200 

Scenic archway at the crest of a mountain pass 200 

No chance for them 208 

Joss house, Foochow and Baby Tower where girl infants are 

thrown when not wanted 208 

One of two hundred day schools organized by a Foochow mis- 
sionary 213 

A bride's canopy, Peking 213 

High altar of a Buddhist temple of the Kushan monastery . 221 v 

Temple in a gorge, Kushan monastery 221 >' 

A wealthy Shansi family of foreignizing tendencies . . . 226 

Monks of Kushan Monastery 226 

A noble type of Christian 232 l/ 

A distinguished pastor whose face reveals the high possibili- 
ties of his race 232 

How a road wears down into the loess 237 v 



LIST OF ILLUSTEATIONS 

PAGE 

Buddhist monks on pilgrimage to Wutaiskan on the Five Sa- 
cred Mountains 237 ^ 

Temple in Canton 243 * 

An Alpine road in western Shensi 248' ^ 

Monastery on the "Little Orphan" isle on the Yangtse . . 248 t -'' 
A Cliff shrine near the northern frontier of Szechuan . . 254 ^ 

Looking south from the Bell Tower, Sianfu 263 ^ 

The east gate of Taiyuanfu, showing macadamized street . 263 l/ 
An ancient ornamental gate over the Southwestern Highroad 269 - 
One of the ancient brick signal-towers occurring every three 
miles on the Southwestern highroad uniting Peking with 

the remote provinces 269 

The type of public monument universal in Shansi .... 278 

Grave-stones, Chihli 278 

Cedars on the main road across Northern Szechuan. Each 

tree is protected by a tablet warning against depredation 283 
Patriarch on the highway. Willows line the road most of the 

way from Tungkwan to Sianfu 283 

Ferrying across the Yellow Biver 292 

Houses with brick stoops and benches, showing resort to mud 

and brick in a timberless country 292 

Noontide in a street of Paisiang 300 ' y 

In the valley of the Wei 300 

A horseshoe tomb in a South China hillside 305 

Coffins in rest-house waiting for the lucky day 305 

Outlook tower of the Temple of the Flowing Waters in South- 
ern Shensi. Founded about 200 B. C 313 ^ 

Wayfarers resting in the shade of a tree protected by the 

monuments and the temple 320 

Traffic through the loess en route to the distant railroad . . 320 
The seething whirlpools in the gorges of the Yangtse . . . 329 
In the gorges of the Upper Yangtse 329 u 



PKEFACE 

The old China hand is quite sure one can get 
nowhere by a diligent half year of travel and in- 
quiry in the Far East. "I have been here thirty 
years," says the Chief Engineer, "and the longer 
I stay the less I understand these people." "I 
thought I had made them out after I had lived 
here a couple of years," says the Trader, "but the 
longer I am here the queerer they seem." No 
traveler, if he consults the old treaty-port resi- 
dents, will ever find courage to write anything 
about the Chinese. 

The fact is, to the traveler who appreciates how 
different is the mental horizon that goes with an- 
other stage of culture or another type of social 
organization than his own, the Chinese do not 
seem very puzzling. Allowing for difference in 
outfit of knowledge and fundamental ideas, they 
act much as we should act under their circum- 
stances. The theory, dear to literary inter- 
preters of the Orient, that owing to diversity in 



xvi PEEFACE 

mental constitution the yellow man and the white 
man can never comprehend or sympathize with 
one another, will appeal little to those who from 
their comparative study of societies- have gleaned 
some notion of what naturally follows from isola- 
tion, the acute struggle for existence, ancestor 
worship, patriarchal authority, the subjection of 
women, the decline of militancy, and the ascend- 
ancy of scholars. 

Edward Alsworth Koss„ 



THE CHANGING CHINESE 



THE 
CHANGING CHINESE 

CHAPTEE I 

CHINA TO THE BANGING EYE 

CHINA is the European Middle Ages made 
visible. All the cities are walled and the 
walls and gates have been kept in repair with an 
eye to their effectiveness. The mandarin has his 
headquarters only in a walled fortress-city and 
to its shelter he retires when a sudden tempest 
of rebellion vexes the peace of his district. 

The streets of the cities are narrow, crooked, 
poorly-paved, filthy and malodorous. In North 
China they admit the circulation of the heavy 
springless carts by which alone passengers are 
carried ; but, wherever rice is cultivated, the mule 
is eliminated and the streets are adapted only 
to the circulation of wheel-barrows and pedes- 
trians. There is little or no assertion of the 
public interest in the highway and hence private 
interests close in upon the street and well-nigh 
block it. The shopkeeper builds his counter in 
front of his lot line ; the stalls line the street with 
their crates and baskets; the artisans overflow 
into it with their workbenches, and the final 
result is that the traffic filters painfully through 

3 



4 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

a six-foot passage which would be yet more en- 
croached on but for the fact that the officials in- 
sist on there being room left for their sedan chairs 
to pass each other. 

The straitened streets are always crowded 
and give the traveler the impression of a high 
density and an enormous population. But the 
buildings are chiefly one story in height and, with 
the exception of Peking, Chinese cities cover 
no very great area. For literary effect their 
population has been recklessly exaggerated and, 
in the absence of reliable statistics, every trav- 
eler has felt at liberty to adopt the highest guess. 

Until recently there was no force in the cities 
to maintain public order. Now, khaki-clad po- 
licemen, club in hand, patrol the streets, but their 
efficiency in time of tumult is by no means vin- 
dicated. A slouching, bare-foot, mild-faced gen- 
darme such as you see in Canton is by no means 
an awe-inspiring embodiment of the majesty of 
the law. 

There is no common supply of water. When 
a city lies by a river the raw river water is borne 
about to the houses by regular water-carriers 
and the livelong day the river-stairs are wet 
from the drip of buckets. When the water is 
too thick it is partially clarified by stirring it 
with a perforated joint of bamboo containing 
some pieces of alum. 

There is no public lighting and after nightfall 
the streets are dark, forbidding, and little fre- 
quented. Until kerosene began to penetrate the 




A pottery — the walls built with defective pots 




A blocked, path 



_ 



CHINA TO THE BANGING EYE 7 

Empire the common source of light was a candle 
in a paper lantern or a cotton wick lighted 
in an open cup of peanut oil. Owing to the lack 
of a good illuminant the bulk of the people retire 
with the fowls and rise with the sun. By mak- 
ing the evening of some account for reading or 
for family intercourse, kerosene has been a great 
boon to domestic life. 

Fuel is scarce and is sold in neat bundles of 
kindling size. Down the West Eiver ply innu- 
merable boats corded high with firewood floating 
down to Canton and Hong Kong. Higher and 
higher the tree destruction extends and farther 
and farther does the axman work his way from 
the waterways. Chaff and straw, twigs and 
leaves and litter are burned in the big brick bed- 
steads that warm the sleepers on winter nights 
and under the big shallow copper vessels set in 
the low brick or mud stoves. Fuel is econo- 
mized and household economy simplified among 
the poor by the custom of relying largely on the 
food cooked and vended in the street. The port- 
able restaurant is in high favor, for our preju- 
dice against food cooked outside the home is a 
luxury the common people cannot afford to in- 
dulge in. 

Proper chimneys are wanting and wherever 
cooking goes on the walls are black with the 
smoke that is left to escape as it will. Chinese 
interiors are apt to be dark for, in the absence 
of window glass, the only means of letting in 
light without weather is by pasting paper on 



8 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

lattice. The floors are dirt, brick or tile, the 
roof tile or thatch. To the passer-by private 
ease and luxury are little in evidence. If a man 
has house and grounds of beauty, a high wall 
hides them from the gaze of the public. Open 
lawns and gardens are never seen and there is 
no greenery accessible to the public unless it be 
the grove of an occasional temple. 

In the houses of the wealthy, although there 
is much beauty to be seen, the standard of neat- 
ness is not ours. Cobwebs, dust, or incipient 
dilapidation do not excite the servant or mortify 
the proprietor. While a mansion may contain 
priceless porcelains and display embroideries 
and furniture that would be pronounced beauti- 
ful the world over, in general, the interiors 
wrought by the Chinese artisan do not compare 
in finish with those of his Western confrere. 

Most striking is the contrast between China 
and Japan in respect to neatness. The Chinese 
seem neglectful, and ignorant of the art of care- 
taking and repair. They have never acted on 
the maxim "a stitch in time saves nine." They 
prefer to build new rather than to keep up the 
old. With " China" rise recollections of tat- 
tered mat sails catching the wind like a sieve, 
leaning and crumbling walls, sagging temple 
roofs, moss-grown loosened tiles, cracked pave- 
ments, ragged thatch, rotting ceiling-cloths, rick- 
ety screens and paved roads with their stones 
tilting and broken. In Japan everything looks 
spick and span — thatch well trimmed, walls well 



CHINA TO THE RANGING EYE 11 

washed, mats bright, roads in good repair, piles 
of rubbish nowhere to be seen. Nothing have I 
seen to compare with it save in Holland, Nor- 
mandy and parts of England. After the memor- 
able inundations of August, 1910, the celerity with 
which these wonderful Japanese cleaned up and 
set things in order was marvelous. 

About Japanese cottages you see none of the 
piles of rubbish, muck heaps, dirty pools, mud 
holes, sagging roofs, toppling walls, rotting 
thatch or loose stones one notices about most 
Chinese villages. When a roof, wall, fence, 
hedge, dam, bridge, or path is damaged, it is re- 
paired at once. Among us, only New England 
and places settled from Yankeedom can compare 
with Japan in tidiness. 

No memory of China is more haunting than 
that of the everlasting blue cotton garments. 
The common people wear coarse deep-blue 
"nankeen." The gala dress is a cotton gown of 
a delicate bird's-egg blue or a silk jacket of rich 
hue. In cold weather the poor wear quilted cot- 
ton, while the well-to-do keep themselves warm 
with fur-lined garments of silk. A general adop- 
tion of Western dress would bring on an economic 
crisis, for the Chinese are not ready to rear 
sheep on a great scale and it will be long before 
they can supply themselves with wool. The 
Chinese jacket is fortunate in opening at the 
side instead of at the front. When the winter 
winds of Peking gnaw at you with Siberian 
teeth, you realize how stupid is our Western way 



12 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

of cutting a notch in front right down through 
overcoat, coat and vest, apparently in order that 
the cold may do its worst to the tender throat and 
chest. On seeing the sensible Chinaman bring 
his coat squarely across his front and fasten it 
on his shoulder, you feel like an exposed totem- 
worshiper. 

Wherever stone is to be had, along or spanning 
the main roads are to be seen the memorial arches 
known as pailows erected by imperial permission 
to commemorate some deed or life of extraor- 
dinary merit. It is significant that when they 
proclaim achievement, it is that of the scholar, 
not that of the warrior. They enclose a central 
gateway flanked by two and sometimes by four 
smaller gateways, and comform closely to a few 
standard types, all of real beauty. As a well- 
built pailow lasts for centuries and as the erection 
of such a memorial is one of the first forms of 
outlay that occur to a philanthropic Chinaman, 
they accumulate, and sometimes the road near 
cities is lined with these structures until' one 
wearies of so much repetition of the same thing 
however beautiful. 

In South-China cities a tall moat-girt building, 
six or seven stories high, flat-topped and with 
small windows high up, towers over the mean 
houses like a medieval donjon keep. It is the 
pawnshop, which also serves the public as bank 
and safety deposit vault for the reason that it 
can for some hours bid defiance to any robber at- 
tack. In the larger centers sumptuous guild- 



CHINA TO THE BANGING EYE 13 

halls are to be seen and the highly embellished 
club-houses of the men from other provinces, who 
feel themselves as truly strangers in a strange 
land as did the Flemish or the Hansa traders in 
the London of the thirteenth century. Some- 
times men from different provinces join in es- 
tablishing such headquarters and I recall in 
Sianfu the stately ' ' Tri-province Club" accom- 
modating strangers from Szechuan, Shansi and 
Honan. 

In the absence of good roads and draft animals 
the utmost use has been made of the countless 
waterways and there are probably as many boats 
in China as in all the rest of the world. No- 
where else are there such clever river-people, no- 
where else is there so lavish an application of 
man-muscle to water movement. The rivers are 
alive with junks propelled by rowers who oc- 
cupy the forward deck and stand as they ply 
the oar. Sixteen or eighteen rowers man the 
bigger boats and as, bare to the waist, they forge 
by in rhythmic swing chanting their song of labor 
the effect is fine. Save when there is a stiff 
breeze to sail with, the up-river junks are towed 
along the bank, and, as no tow-path has ever 
been built, the waste of toil in scrambling along 
slippery banks, clambering over rocks or creep- 
ing along narrow ledges with the tow-rope is 
distressing to behold. 

In the South population is forced from the land 
onto the water and myriads pass their lives in 
sampans and house-boats. In good weather these 



14 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

poor families, living as it were in a single small 
room with a porch at either end, seem as happy as 
people anywhere. There is no landlord to 
threaten eviction, no employer to grind them 
down, no foreman to speed them np. There is 
infinite variety in the stirring life of river and 
foreshore that passes under their eyes; the bab- 
ble and chatter never cease and no one need ever 
feel lonely. The tiny home can be kept with a 
Dutch cleanliness for water is always to be had 
with a sweep of the arm. They pay no rent and 
can change neighbors, residence, scenery or oc- 
cupation when they please. No people is more 
natural, animated and self-expressive, for they 
have simplified life without impoverishing it and 
have remained free even under the very harrow- 
tooth of poverty. 

Their children, little river Arabs, have their 
wits sharpened early and not for long is the baby 
tied to a sealed empty jar that by floating will 
mark his location in case he tumbles into the 
water. The year-old child knows how to take 
care of himself. The tot of three or four can 
handle the oar or the pole and is as sharp as our 
boys of six or seven. Nothing escapes their pry- 
ing black eyes and they can coax coppers out of 
you as prettily as any Italian bambino. 

Although the gates of the Chinese city close 
at night, the city is by no means so cut off from 
the open country as with us. The man in the 
street never quite lets go of his kinsfolk in the 
rural village. When, a little while ago, ship 



CHINA TO THE BANGING EYE 17 

building and repairing became dull in Hong 
Kong, there was no hanging of the unemployed 
about the wharves, not because they had found 
other jobs, but because most of them had dis- 
persed to their ancestral seats in the country, 
there to work on the old place till times im- 
proved. The man's family always give him a 
chance and there is rice in the pot for him and 
his. Nor is this tie with the mother-stem al- 
lowed to decay with the lapse of time. The suc- 
cessful merchant registers his male children in 
the ancestral temple of his clan, contributes to 
its upkeep and is entitled to his portion of roast- 
pork on the occasion of the yearly clan festival, 
visits the old home during the holidays, sends 
money back so that his people may buy more 
land, takes his children out so they will get ac- 
quainted and perhaps lets them pass their boy- 
hood in the ancestral village so that, after he is 
gone, they will love and cherish the old tie to the 
soil. By such means, provided war or flood or 
famine has not uprooted the stock, a city family, 
even after the lapse of generations, retains a con- 
nection with its rural kindred. A Chinese city 
is not, therefore, a genuine civic community but 
rather an agglomeration of persons who are 
members of numerous little groups. No doubt 
the establishment of municipal councils and the 
grant to the citizens of control over their com- 
mon affairs will tend to create a community- 
spirit and weaken the feeling for the rural clan. 
The mementos of the departed are so promi- 



18 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

nent that one might hesitate to say whether 
China belongs to the living or to the dead. The 
dead have been interred in burial places of 
families or clans, not collected into cemeteries. 
In the vicinity of the cities the landscape is 
pustuled with graves and the dedication of the 
land to this pious use makes very difficult an 
extra-mural growth of the city. The campus of 
the Canton Christian College represents three 
hundred and sixty separate conveyances and is 
still dotted with grave sites, the owners of which 
refuse to sell. "Best houses" are provided 
where encoffined bodies are kept for months, 
sometimes for years, until a lucky day and place 
for interment are discovered by the geomancer. 
The Chinese coffin is put together not of boards 
but of split hollowed logs and this pious but ex- 
travagant custom has something to answer for 
in the denuded appearance of the country. 

Some of the most characteristic impressions of 
China are connected with the great loess deposit 
that mantles the larger part of North China to 
the depth sometimes of hundreds of feet. Geol- 
ogists interpret it as an accumulation of the dust 
that the prevailing winds blowing from the arid in- 
terior of Asia have sifted over the country. It is 
unstratified, splits vertically, contains land shells 
but no marine shells, and shows vertical tubes 
as big as a needle which are supposed to have 
been left by the decay of the roots of the grass 
that clothed the surface as the deposit slowly 
built up. "Where this mantle of dust fell on the 




Indian bullock in a Quangsi bullock-cart 




A Peking cart 



CHINA TO THE BANGING EYE 21 

mountains it was soon worn thin so that the 
bones of the land protrude. But what has been 
washed from the steeper slopes has settled about 
their base, filled up the lesser depressions and 
softened the original outlines of the country. 

The streams have cut down through the loess 
and are all deeply stained with its characteristic 
brown-yellow. Sweeping along so much of it they 
cannot maintain a free channel for heavy navi- 
gation and after they debouch upon the plain they 
are prone to choke their bed and shift their 
course. It is the loess that gives us Yellow 
Eiver, Yellow Sea, Yellow Emperor (Hwangti) 
and makes yellow the imperial color. The north- 
ern half of the Peking-Hankow Eailway trav- 
erses a vast yellow universe with scarcely a 
stone, hill or tree. The soil and the streams are 
yellow, the flat-roofed houses are yellow, the 
walls of cities and villages are yellow. The air 
is yellow with dust, the vegetation is coated with 
it, the yellow people and their clothing are pow- 
dered with it, and everything melts into the most 
monochrome countryside peopled by civilized 
men. 

The loess slices like cheese and after three or 
four years the marks of pick and spade are still 
plain on the sides of the railway cuttings. Hence 
most of the people in the mountains house them- 
selves simply by digging a cave in a bank which 
when plastered gives them a clean dry habita- 
tion, warm in winter, cool in summer, and ex- 
cellent in everything save ventilation. Some of 



22 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

these have two or three stories, boast framed 
windows and doorways, and are well furnished. 
It is rather startling, however, to look over a 
broad flat country checkered with fields in a 
state of high cultivation and see no roads, 
houses, people or domestic animals. The roads 
have cut their way into the loess and run at the 
bottom of canyons sometimes seventy or eighty 
feet deep. In the cliffs that line the roads and 
watercourses the viewless population have carved 
their dwellings and stables. 

In China the notion of an undistributed public 
good distinct from private goods has never es- 
tablished itself in the general mind. The State 
has been tribute-taker rather than guardian of 
the general welfare, so the community is sacri- 
ficed to the individual, the public to the local 
group, and posterity to the living. Along the 
Wei Eiver great quantities of quick-growing trees 
are scattered amid the crops while the mountains 
two or three miles away are denuded. Instead 
of growing their wood and fuel on the rough 
land which is good for nothing else, they grow 
it in their fields to the detriment of their crops 
because, in the absence of public administration, 
the mountains are a no-man's land which all may 
ravage and abuse. 

The destruction of the remaining forests goes 
on apace for the officials are utterly indifferent. 
In North Chihli near Jehol there has recently 
been a great butchery of what was but a few years 
ago a noble forest. One finds enough fine 



CHINA TO THE BANGING EYE 23 

straight poles of larch and pine piled up to string 
a telegraph wire a thousand miles. There they 
lie rotting while crooked willow carries the wires. 
No doubt some official got his "squeeze" out of 
the cutting of the trees for these poles, and now 
nobody cares what becomes of them. 

On the Kowloon hills opposite Hong Kong there 
are frightful evidences of erosion due to deforesta- 
tion several hundred years ago. The loose soil 
has been washed away till the country is knobbed 
or blistered with great granite boulders. North 
of the Gulf of Tonkin I am told that not a tree 
is to be seen and the surviving balks between the 
fields show that much land once cultivated has 
become waste. Erosion stripped the soil down 
to the clay and the farmers had to abandon the 
land. The denuded hill-slopes facing the West 
Eiver have been torn and gullied till the red 
earth glows through the vegetation like blood. 
The coast hills of Fokien have lost most of their 
soil and show little but rocks. Fuel-gatherers 
constantly climb about them grubbing up shrubs 
and pulling up the grass. No one tries to grow 
trees unless he can live in their midst and so 
prevent their being stolen. The higher ranges 
further back have been stripped of their trees 
but not of their soil for, owing to the greater 
rainfall they receive, a verdant growth quickly 
springs up and protects their flanks. 

Deep-gullied plateaus of the loess, guttered 
hillsides, choked water-courses, silted-up bridges, 
sterilized bottom lands, bankless wandering 



24 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

rivers, dyked torrents that have built up their 
beds till they meander at the level of the tree- 
tops, mountain brooks as thick as pea soup, tes- 
tify to the changes wrought once the reckless ax 
has let loose the force of running water to re- 
sculpture the landscape. No river could drain 
the friable loess of Northwest China without 
bringing down great quantities of soil that would 
raise its bed and make it a menace in its lower, 
sluggish course. But if the Yellow Eiver is more 
and more "China's Sorrow" as the centuries 
tick -off, it is because the rain runs off the de- 
forested slopes of its drainage basin like water 
off the roof of a house and in the wet season 
rolls down terrible floods which burst the im- 
mense and costly embankments, spread like a lake 
over the plain and drown whole populations. 

The British in Kowloon and the Germans in Kia- 
ochow have made beginnings in re-afforestation; 
but, save for some plantations for growing sleep- 
ers which the Peking-Hankow Bail way Company 
has made on the flanks of the mountains in North- 
ern Hupeh, one sees no restoration by the Chinese 
themselves. If the Chinese had not so early rid 
themselves of feudalism the country might have 
profited, as did Europe during the Middle Ages, 
by the harsh forest laws and the vast wooded 
preserves of a hunting nobility; or a policy of 
national conservation would have availed if be- 
gun five centuries ago. Now, however, nothing 
will meet the dire need of China but a long 
scientific, recuperative treatment far more ex- 




A half -buried gate-tower 




A silted-up bridge in Shansi. One of the ultimate 
results of deforestation 



CHINA TO THE RANGING EYE 27 

tensive and thorough-going than even the most 
enlightened European governments have at- 
tempted. Since that is clearly beyond the fore- 
sight and administrative capacity of this genera- 
tion of Chinese, the slow physical deterioration 
of the country may be expected to continue dur- 
ing our time. 

Despite absence of game protection, China con- 
tains far more wild life than one would expect. 
Tigers and leopards abound in some parts, ducks 
swirl above the Yangtse in flocks of ten thou- 
sand and many foreigners find royal sport for 
the hunter within reach of the treaty ports. One 
reason for so much game in an old thickly-set- 
tled country is that Chinese gentlemen have had 
no taste for the chase, and delight in the de- 
struction of life is not general; another is that 
the government puts so many obstacles in the 
way of the people obtaining firearms that they 
lack the means of killing game. 

The Great "Wall is undoubtedly the grandest 
and most impressive handiwork of man. Be- 
side its colossal bulk our boasted railway em- 
bankments and tunnels seem the work of pyg- 
mies. Save the Pyramids of Egypt and the 
Panama Canal there is no prodigy of toil to be 
mentioned in the same breath with it. The brick 
and stone in every fifty miles of this wall would 
rear a pyramid higher than that of Cheops — and 
there are at least seventeen hundred miles of 
it! At Nankow Pass the wall is wide enough 
for seven or eight men to march abreast along its 



28 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

top, twenty feet high, faced with hewn stone, 
battlemented, and is strengthened every forty or 
fifty rods by huge towers ten yards square in- 
side. It clambers boldly up the steepest slopes, 
creeps along the sheer precipices, and springs 
from height to height leaving a square crenel- 
lated tower on every crown. It follows the comb 
of the mountains in order that the ground may 
slope from it both ways. It zigzags from crest 
to crest, dips into ravines and reappears mount- 
ing the range beyond, so that it is seen in frag- 
ments, the linking parts being hidden in the de- 
files. For perhaps thirty miles the eye follows 
this serpent in stone now streaking up the slopes, 
now passing across the line of vision defined 
against the black of the mountains beyond, now 
cutting the afternoon sky with its battlements 
as it follows some distant ridge. To the north 
the mountains drop away into foothills each 
crowned with its watch-tower. Then a plain, 
another range of mountains with another wall, 
and, beyond, the bleak wind-swept plateau of 
Mongolia. 

As one looked one could in imagination see 
snag-toothed, thin-mustached nomads, in sheep- 
skin coats with the fleece turned inside, halt on 
their shaggy ponies, rest the butts of their spears 
on the ground and search with restless disappoint- 
ed eyes for some weak spot in this wall that had 
never barred the path of their plundering fore- 
fathers. And no doubt the parapet of the wall 
was lined with Chinese soldiers in blue nankeen 



CHINA TO THE RANGING EYE 29 

who jeered at the discomfiture of their dreaded 
hereditary enemies and shot arrows at them 
through the slits in the stone. Now, thanks to 
Buddhism and the Lama priests who have taken 
all the fierceness out of the Mongols, the wall is 
useless. Endless traffic streams unafraid through 
the gateway at the pass. Mile-long trains of 
great shaggy two-humped camels stalk by, bring- 
ing in wool and hides and timber or taking out 
brick tea, matches and kerosene. 

That the Chinese are more homogeneous in 
civilization than in blood comes out clearly when 
one compares the Southern Chinese with the 
Northern. The people of Chihli, in which Peking 
is situated, must be at least six inches taller than 
the Cantonese and the Hakkas. They show the 
effect of the series of admixtures of Tartar blood, 
for they are big sturdy people with a fresh 
color and a frank eye. The railway guards look 
and act like green, honest, good-natured American 
lads fresh from the farm. They are deliberate 
of movement and slow in mental processes, but 
make good friends and good fighters. In the 
South people are smaller, yellower, less manly 
and less courageous. The ugly, wrinkled, cat- 
like wily Chinamen of dime-novel fiction come 
from the South. They are quicker of wit than 
the Northerners but harder for us to understand 
or trust. Upon the Canton type is built the cher- 
ished literary legend of the unfathomableness and 
superhuman craftiness of the Oriental. 

The Northern Chinese, although less fertile in 



30 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

ideas, appear to be steadier in character than the 
Cantonese and more faithful. They are truer to 
their friends and, owing to their mutual trust, 
they combine better. For this reason they may 
be able to work the joint-stock company better 
than the keen, clever merchants of the South and 
hence take the lead in industrial development. 




The great wall 



CHAPTER II 

THE KACE FIBEK OF THE CHINESE 

OUT of ten children born among us three, 
normally the weakest three, will fail to grow 
up. Out of ten children horn in China these 
weakest three will die and probably five more be- 
sides. The difference is owing to the hardships 
that infant life meets with among the Chinese. 
If at birth the white infants and the yellow in- 
fants are equal in stamina, the two surviving 
Chinese ought to possess greater vitality of con- 
stitution than the seven surviving whites. For 
of these seven the five that would infallibly 
have perished under Oriental conditions of life 
are presumably weaker in constitution than the 
two who could have endured even such con- 
ditions. The two Chinese survivors will trans- 
mit some of their superior vitality to their off- 
spring; and these in turn will be subject to the 
same sifting, so that the surviving two-tenths will 
pass on to their children a still greater vitality. 
Hence these divergent child mortalities drive, 
as it were, a wedge between the physiques of the 
two races. If, now, for generations we whites, 
owing to room and plenty and scientific medicine 
and knowledge of hygiene, have been subject to 
a less searching and relentless elimination of the 

33 



34 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

weaker children than the Chinese, it would be 
reasonable to expect the Chinese to exhibit a 
greater vitality than the whites. 

With a view to ascertaining whether the marked 
slackening in our struggle for life during the last 
century or two and our greater skill in keeping 
people alive has produced noticeable effects on 
our physique, I closely questioned thirty-three 
physicians practicing in various parts of China, 
usually at mission hospitals. 

Of these physicians only one, a very intelligent 
German doctor at Tsingtao, had noticed no point 
of superiority in his Chinese patients. He de- 
clared them less resistant to injury, less respon- 
sive to treatment and no more enduring of pain 
than the simple and hardy peasants of Thuringia 
amongst whom he had formerly practiced. Three 
other physicians, each of whom had practiced a 
quarter century or more in China, had observed 
no difference in the physical reactions of the two 
races. I fancy their recollections of their brief 
student practice at home had so faded with time 
that they lacked one of the terms of the com- 
parison. Moreover, two of these admitted under 
questioning that the Chinese do stand high fevers 
remarkably well and that they do recover from 
blood poisoning when a white man would die. 

The remaining twenty-nine physicians were 
positive that the Chinese physique evinces some 
superiority or other over that of their home peo- 
ple. As regards surgical cases, the general opin- 
ion is voiced by one English surgeon who said, 



THE RACE FIBER OF THE CHINESE 35 

"They do pull through jolly well!" It was com- 
monly observed that surgical shock is rare, and 
that the proportion of recoveries from serious 
cuttings is as high in the little, poorly equipped, 
semi-aseptic mission hospitals of China as in the 
perfectly appointed, aseptic hospitals at home. 
Dr. Kinnear of Foochow, recently home from a 
furlough in Germany, found that in treating 
phlegma of the hand he, with his poor equipment 
and native assistants, gets as good results as the 
great Von Bergman working under ideal condi- 
tions on the artisan population of Berlin. The 
opinion prevails that under equal conditions the 
Chinese will make a surer and quicker recovery 
from a major operation than the white. 

Many never get over being astonished at the 
recovery of the Chinese from terrible injuries. 
I was told of a coolie who had his abdomen torn 
open in an accident, and who was assisted to the 
hospital supported by a man on either side and 
holding his bowels in his hands. He was sewed 
up and, in spite of the contamination that must 
have gotten into the abdomen, made a quick recov- 
ery! Amazing also is the response to the treat- 
ment of neglected wounds. A boy whose severed 
fingers had been hastily stuck on anyhow and 
bound up with dirty rags came to the hospital 
after a week with a horrible hand and showing 
clear symptoms of lockjaw. They washed his 
hand and sent him home to die. In three days he 
was about without a sign of lockjaw. A man 
whose fingers had been crushed under a cart some 



36 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

days before came in with blood-poisoning all up 
Ms arm and in the glands under the arm. The 
trouble vanished under simple treatment. A pa- 
tient will be brought in with a high fever from a 
wound of several days ' standing full of maggots ; 
yet after the wound is cleansed the fever quickly 
subsides. A woman who had undergone a serious 
operation for cancer of the breast suffered infec- 
tion and had a fever of 106° during which her 
husband fed her with hard water chestnuts. Nev- 
ertheless, she recovered. 

Nearly all are struck by the resistance of the 
Chinese to blood-poisoning. From my note books 
I gather such expressions as, "Blood-poisoning 
very rare; more resistant than we are to septi- 
caemia"; "Belative immunity to pus-producing 
germs"; "More resistant to gangrene than we 
are; injuries which at home would cause serious 
gangrene do not do so here"; "Peculiarly resist- 
ant to infection"; "With badly gangrened wounds 
in the extremities show very little fever and 
quickly get well"; "Women withstand septicaemia 
in maternity cases wonderfully well, recovering 
after the doctors have given them up " ; " Eecover 
from septicaemia after a week of high fever that 
would kill a white man." No wonder there is a 
saying rife among the foreign doctors, "Don't 
give up a Chinaman till he's dead." 

In the South, where foot binding is not preva- 
lent, the women bear their children very easily, 
with little outcry, and are expected to be up in a 
day or two. Dr. Swan of Canton relates that 




A Canton water-front crowd 




Station platform faces 



THE RACE FIBER OF THE CHINESE 39 

more than once on calling for a sampan to take 
him across the river he has been asked to wait a 
quarter or a half an hour. By that time the mis- 
tress of the boat would have given birth to a 
child, laid it in a corner among some rags, and be 
ready to row him across! In childbirth the 
woman attended by a dirty old midwife in a filthy 
hovel escapes puerperal fever under conditions 
that would certainly kill a white woman. In cases 
of difficult birth, when after a couple of days the 
white physician is called in and removes the dead 
infant, the woman has some fever but soon re- 
covers. The women, moreover, are remarkably 
free from displacements and other troubles pecul- 
iar to the sex. 

Living in a supersaturated, man-stifled land, 
profoundly ignorant of the principles of hygiene, 
the masses have developed an immunity to noxious 
microbes which excites the wonder and envy of 
the foreigner. They are not affected by a mos- 
quito bite that will raise a large lump on the lately- 
come foreigner. They can use contaminated 
water from canals without incurring dysentery. 
There is very little typhoid and what there is 
occurs in such mild form that it was long doubted 
to be typhoid. The fact was settled affirmatively 
only by laboratory tests. All physicians agree 
that among the Chinese smallpox is a mild dis- 
ease. One likened it to the mumps. Organic 
heart trouble, usually the result of rheumatic 
fever, is declared to be very rare. 

It is universally remarked that in taking chloro- 



40 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

form the Chinese rarely pass through an excited 
stage, but go off very quietly. From after-nausea 
they are almost wholly free. One physician of 
twenty-five years' practice has never had a death 
from chloroform, although he has not administered 
ether half a dozen times. The fact is, however, 
they stolidly endure operations which we would 
never perform without anesthetics. Small tumors 
are usually thus removed and, in extracting teeth, 
gas is never administered. Sometimes extensive 
cutting, e. g., the removal of a tumor reaching 
down into and involving the excision of the de- 
cayed end of a rib, is borne without flinching. 
Only three physicians interviewed failed to re- 
mark the insensibility of their patients to pain. 
Here, perhaps, is the reason why no people in the 
world have used torture so freely as the Chinese. 
This bluntness of nerve, however, does not appear 
to be universal. The scholars, who usually neg- 
lect to balance their intense brain work with due 
physical exercise, are not stoical. The meat-eat- 
ing and wine-bibbing classes lack the insensibility 
of the vegetarian, non-alcoholic masses. The 
self-indulgent gentry, who shun all activity, bodily 
or mental, and give themselves up to sensual grati- 
fication, are very sensitive to pain and very fear- 
ful of it. Some make the point, therefore, that the 
oft-noted dullness of sensibility is not a race trait, 
but a consequence of the involuntary simplicity 
and temperateness of life of the common Chinese. 
One doctor remarks that at home it is the reg- 
ular thing for a nervous chill to follow the pass- 



THE EACE FIBEE OF THE CHINESE 41 

ing of a sound into the bladder, whereas among 
his patients it seldom occurs. Another co mm ents 
on the rarity of neurasthenia and nervous dys- 
pepsia. The chief of the army medical staff 
points out that during the autumn manceuvers the 
soldiers sleep on damp ground with a little straw 
under them without any ill effects. I have seen 
coolies after two hours of burden-bearing at a dog 
trot shovel themselves full of hot rice with scarcely 
any mastication, and hurry on for another two 
hours. A white man would have writhed with 
indigestion. The Chinese seem able to sleep in 
any position. I have seen them sleeping on piles 
of bricks, or stones, or poles, with a block or a 
brick for a pillow, and with the hot sun shining 
full into the face. They stand a cramped position 
longer than we can and can keep on longer at 
monotonous toil unrelieved by change or break. 

But there is another side to the comparison. 
There is little pneumonia among the Chinese but 
they stand it no better than we do ; some say not 
so well. There is much malarial fever and it goes 
hard with them. In Hong Kong they seem to suc- 
cumb to the plague more readily than the foreign- 
ers. Among children there is heavy mortality 
from measles and scarlet fever. In withstanding 
tuberculosis they have no advantage over us. 
While they make wonderful recoveries from high 
fevers they are not enduring of long fevers. Some 
think this is because the flame of their vitality 
has been turned low by unsanitary living. They 
have a horror of fresh air and shut it out of the 



42 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

sleeping apartment, even on a warm night. In 
the mission schools, if the teachers insist on open 
windows in the dormitory, the pupils stifle under 
the covers lest the evil spirits flying about at night 
should get at them. The Chinese grant that 
hygiene may be all very well for these weakly 
foreigners, but see no use in it for themselves. 
It is no wonder, therefore, that their schoolgirls 
cannot stand the pace of American schoolgirls. 
Often they break down, or go into a decline, or 
have to take a long rest. In the English mission 
schools with their easier pace the girls get on 
better. 

Here and there a doctor ascribes the extraordi- 
nary power of resistance and recuperation shown 
by his patients entirely to their diet and manner 
of life and denies any superior vitality in the race. 
Other doctors practicing among the city Chinese 
insist that the stamina of the masses is under- 
mined by wretched living conditions, but that 
under equal circumstances the yellow man has a 
firmer hold on life than the white man. 

From the testimony it is safe to conclude that 
at least a part of the observed toughness of the 
Chinese is attributable to a special race vitality 
which they have acquired in the course of a longer 
and severer elimination of the less fit than our 
North-European ancestors ever experienced in 
their civilized state. Such selection has tended to 
foster not so much bodily strength or energy as 
recuperative power, resistance to infection and 




The river stairs up which all the water 
for Chungking is borne 



THE RACE FIBER OF THE CHINESE 45 

tolerance of unwholesome conditions of living. 
For many centuries the people of South and Cen- 
tral China, crowded together in their villages or 
walled cities, have used water from contaminated 
canals or from the drainings of the rice fields; 
eaten of the scavenging pig or of vegetables stim- 
ulated by the contents of the cesspool; huddled 
under low roofs on dirt floors in filthy lanes, and 
slept in fetid dens and stifling cubicles. Myriads 
succumbed to the poisons generated by overcrowd- 
ing, and hardly a quarter of those born lived to 
transmit their immunity to their children. The 
surviving fittest has been the type able to with- 
stand foul air, stench, fatigue toxin, dampness, 
bad food, and noxious germs. I have no doubt 
that if an American population of equal size lived 
in Amoy or Soochow as the Chinese there live, a 
quarter would be dead by the end of the first sum- 
mer. But the toughening takes place to the detri- 
ment of bodily growth and strength. Chinese 
children are small for their age. At birth the 
infants are no stronger than ours. The weaker 
are more thoroughly weeded out, but even the 
surviving remnant is for a time weakened by the 
hardships that have killed the rest. 

I would not identify the great vitality of the 
Chinese with the primitive vitality you find in 
Bedouins, or Sea Dyaks, or American Indians. 
This early endowment consists in unusual mus- 
cular strength and endurance, in normality of 
bodily functions, and in power to bear hardship 
and exposure. It does not extend to immunity 



46 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

from disease. Subjected to the conditions the 
civilized man lives under, savages die off like 
tlies. Peary's Eskimos could survive a fetid 
Greenland igloo but not an airy New York board- 
ing- bouse. The diseases that the colonizing Euro- 
pean communicates to natural men clears them 
away more swiftly than his gunpowder. Entrance 
upon the civilized state entails a universal ex- 
change of disease germs and the necessary growth 
of immunity. Now, it is precisely in his power 
to withstand the poisons with which close-dwellers 
infect one another that the Chinaman is unique. 
This power does not seem to be a heritage from 
his nomad life o( five or six thousand years ago. 
It is rather the painful acquisition o( a later social 
phase. It could have grown up only in congested 
cities, or under an agriculture that contaminates 
every growing plant, converts every stream into 
an open sewer, and tills the land with mosquito- 
breeding rice fields. Such toleration of pathogenic 
microbes has, perhaps, never before been devel- 
oped and it certainly will never be developed 
again. Now that man knows how to clear away 
from his path these invisible enemies, he will never 
consent to buy immunity at the old cruel price. 
To the AVest the toughness of the Chinese 
physique may have a sinister military significance. 
Nobody fears lest in a stand-up fight Chinese 
troops could whip an equal number of well-condi- 
tioned white troops. But few battles are fought 
by men fresh from tent and mess. In the course 
of a prolonged campaign involving irregular pro- 



THE RACE FIBER OF THE CHINESE 47 

visioning, bad drinking water, lying out, loss of 
sleep, exhausting marches, exposure, excitement 
and anxiety, it may be that the white soldiers 
would be worn down worse than the yellow sol- 
diers. In that case the hardier men with less 
of the martial spirit might in the closing 
grapple beat the better fighters with the less en- 
durance. 

In view of what has been shown, the competi- 
tion of white laborer and yellow is not so simple 
a test of human worth as some may imagine. 
Under good conditions the white man can best 
the yellow man in turning off work. But under 
bad conditions the yellow man can best the white 
man because he can better endure spoiled food, 
poor clothing, foul air, noise, heat, dirt, discom- 
fort and microbes. Reilly can outdo Ah San, but 
Ah San can underlive Reilly. Ah San cannot 
take away Reilly 's job as being a better work- 
man; but, because he can live and do some work 
at a wage on which Reilly cannot keep himself 
fit to work at all, three or four Ah Sans can take 
Reilly 's job from him. And they will do it, too, 
unless they are barred out of the market where 
Reilly is selling his labor. Reilly 's endeavor to 
exclude Ah San from his labor market is not the 
case of a man dreading to pit himself on equal 
terms against a better man. Indeed, it is not 
quite so simple and selfish and narrow-minded as 
all that. 

It is a case of a man fitted to get the most 
out of good conditions refusing to yield his place 



48 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

to a iveaker man able to withstand bad condi- 
tions. 

* Of course, with the coming in of Western sani- 
tation, the terrible selective process by which 
Chinese toughness has been built up will come to 
an end, and this property will gradually fade out 
of the race physique. But for our time at least 
it is a serious and pregnant fact. It will take 
some generations of exposure to the relaxing 
effects of drains, ventilation, doctors, district 
nurses, food inspectors, pure water, open spaces 
and out-of-door sports to eradicate the peculiar 
vitality which the yellow race has acquired. Dur- 
ing the interim the chief effect of freely admitting 
coolies to the labor markets of the West would 
be the substitution of low wages, bad living con- 
ditions and the increase of the yellow race for 
high wages, good living conditions and the in- 
crease of the white race. 




Scene in the Imperial City, Peking- 




Hovel on beach at Kiukiang. Over the door 
the character for "happiness" 



CHAPTER III 

THE BACE MIND OP THE CHINESE 

THE more cheaply gotten-up races of men have 
a short mental circuit and respond promptly 
to stimulus. Knowing the impulses aroused in 
them by their experiences you can foretell their 
actions. They cannot inhibit their impulses and 
let them accumulate until reflection has fused them 
into a conscious purpose. But the races of the 
higher destiny are not so easily set in motion. 
They are able to hold back and digest their im- 
pulses. The key to their conduct is to be found, 
not in their impressions, but in their thoughts and 
convictions. Their course is to be interpreted 
not by their impulses but by their purposes. Their 
intellect is a massive fly-wheel by means of which 
continuous will power is derived from confused 
and intermittent stimuli. The man of this type 
does not act till he has made up his mind and he 
does not make up his mind till he has heard both 
sides. His emotion is not as the crackling of dry 
thorns under a pot, but like the lasting glow that 
will smelt iron. He obeys not his promptings, but 
his decisions. His conduct is not fitful and zigzag, 
but even and consistent. More and more this 
steady and reliable type is demanded in a social 
organization so complex that normal action must 

3 51 



52 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

be deliberate and in a civilization so scientific that 
pondered knowledge is essential to wise decis- 
ion. 

We like to think of the Anglo-Saxons as of this 
stable type and feel that snch an endowment makes 
up to our race for its lack of the quick mobile feel- 
ing, the social tact and the sensitiveness to beauty 
so characteristic of South Europeans. Now, of 
this massive unswerving type are the Chinese. 
Fiery or headlong action is the last thing to be 
expected of yellow men. They command their 
feelings and know how to bide their time. They 
are not hot to-day, cold to-morrow. Hard are they 
to move, but once in motion they have momentum. 
Slow are they to promise, but once they have 
promised for a consideration they "stick." They 
are stubborn to convert but they make staunch 
converts. Their eloquence is more akin to the 
eloquence of Pitt or Bright than to that of O'Con- 
nell or Gambetta. One does not term suicide a 
"rash act" in a land where so many suicides are 
carried out of set purpose. Instead of assassi- 
nating the high-placed betrayer of his country, 
the Chinese patriot sends his Emperor a plain- 
spoken memorial about the traitor and then kills 
himself to show he is in earnest. No matter what 
their intensity of feeling, the members of the pro- 
vincial assemblies that met for the first time two 
years ago kept themselves in hand and surprised 
the world by their self-restraint and decorum. 

Some observations made by a gentleman writing 
life insurance in Hawaii throw a strong light on 



THE EACE MIND OF THE CHINESE 53 

Chinese traits. He found the Japanese impres- 
sible and easy to persuade, especially if he 
learns that other Japanese are taking out poli- 
cies. Tell him his friend So-and-So has insured 
and he promptly orders a bigger policy. But 
when a month later the policy arrives from the 
New York office his interest has cooled and he 
will never take it unless he was required to make 
an advance payment. On the other hand, the 
Chinaman can be neither cajoled nor stampeded. 
He takes a sample policy home, studies it over 
night, and is ready next day with his answer. If it 
is "Yes," he invariably refuses to make an ad- 
vance payment on the ground that, as yet, he has 
received nothing of value. When the policy 
arrives he receipts for it, takes it home, and com- 
pares it line by line with the sample policy. The 
next day he is always ready with the premium. 
I introduce this comparison not to discredit the 
Japanese, for their gifts are well known, but to 
bring out the deliberate unimpressible character 
of the Chinese. 

Chinese conservatism, unlike the conservatism 
of the lower races, is not merely an emotional atti- 
tude. It is not inspired chiefly by dread of the 
unknown, horror of the new, or a fanatical attach- 
ment to a system of ideas which gives them confi- 
dence in the established. It is the logical outcome 
of precedent. Change the ideas of the Chinese 
and their policy will , change. Let their minds 
be possessed by a philosophy that makes them 
doubt the past and have confidence in the future, 



54 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

and they will prove to be as consistently pro- 
gressive as are the Germans of to-day. 

The Nestor of the missionaries, Doctor Martin 
of Peking, after his sixty years of labor in the 
Orient, believes that the modern Chinese have 
somehow lost the originality and inventiveness 
their forefathers possessed in the great days of 
old when the civilization of the Middle Kingdom 
was still in the gristle. He surmises that this 
precious endowment was wasted by the continued 
use of the memory-taxing ideographic language or 
by a cram system of education shaped with refer- 
ence to passing competitive examinations. To 
those of us who question the atrophy of a race 
quality through disuse, and doubt if any amount 
of sterilizing education can quench the originality 
of a race beyond the generation submitted to it, 
it seems more likely that the contemporary 
Chinese intellect is sterile because of the state of 
the social mind. 

It is true that the culture development of the 
Chinese ceased at stages no more difficult to nego- 
tiate than the earlier stages. In painting they 
never mastered perspective. In music they never 
achieved harmony. Their language is lacking in 
relative pronouns and other words indicating the 
relation of statements to one another. Their 
writing is arrested at the level of ancient Baby- 
lonia and Egypt. For many centuries, however, 
their psychological climate has been unfavorable 
to innovating thought. As well expect the apple 
tree to blossom in October as expect genius to 




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THE EACE MIND OF THE CHINESE 57 

bloom among a people convinced that the perfec- 
tion of wisdom had been granted to the sages of 
antiquity. Before he has fairly begun to bring 
forth, the fresh thinker has been discouraged and 
intimidated by the leaden weight of conservative 
opinion about him. In a word, the social atmos- 
phere has become oppressive, lacking the stimu- 
lating oxygen it had in the distant days when the 
Chinese invented gunpowder, block printing, bank- 
notes, porcelain, the compass, the compartment 
boat and the taxicab. 

The patent stagnation of the collective mind is 
due not to native sluggishness but to prepossession 
by certain beliefs. These beliefs are tenaciously 
held because in their practical outworkings they 
have been successful. Under them vast popula- 
tions have been able to attain order, security and 
a goodly measure of happiness. Moreover, as 
these beliefs have expanded their circle of influ- 
ence, they have never — until lately — encountered 
any system of ideas that could withstand them. 
Chinese culture has spread and spread until all 
Eastern Asia bows to it. Nestorian Christianity 
flourished there and vanished. The Jews of 
Kaifeng-fu lost their language and religion and 
became Chinese in all but physiognomy. The 
conquering Manchus have forgotten their language 
and literature. "China," it has been finely said, 
"is a sea which salts everything that flows into 
it." The guardians of a culture so vanquishing 
may well be pardoned for regarding as presump- 
tuous any endeavor to improve on it. 



58 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

For centuries the Chinese have found themselves 
in the situation our descendants will perhaps find 
themselves in when, half a thousand years hence, 
they are enfolded in the colossal body of a single 
self -consistent planetary culture; when scientific 
research shall have long been subject to the law 
of diminishing returns; when nothing but a thin 
rill of trifling discoveries will trickle from the 
splendid laboratories; when the proceedings of 
scientific congresses will be as trivial as the dis- 
cussions of the Church Councils of the seventh cen- 
tury; when the elite of the human race will have 
forgotten the thrill from such fructifying new 
truths as our generation has enjoyed in the dis- 
covery of radioactivity, the germ origin of disease, 
natural selection, mutation, and mental suggesti- 
bility. Then, perhaps, without any abatement of 
its powers, the intellect of our race may develop 
such unshakable faith in the soundness and suffi- 
ciency of its system of scientific knowledge and 
thought, that nothing but intercourse with the 
Martians will be able to release it from the numb- 
ing grasp of the established and arouse it to fresh 
conquests. 

It is rash, therefore, to take the observed ster- 
ility of the Celestial mind during the period of 
intercourse with the West as proof of race defi- 
ciency. Chinese culture is undergoing a break- 
ing-up process which will release powerful indi- 
vidualities from the spell of the past and of 
numbers, and stimulate them to high personal 
achievement. In the Malay States, where the 




Altar, Temple of Heaven, Peking- 




View in the Temple grounds of the Ming 
Tombs. Mountains near Peking 



THE EACE MIND OF THE CHINESE 61 

Chinese escape the lifeless atmosphere and the 
confining social organization of their own land, 
their ingenuity is already such that unprejudiced 
white men have come to regard them as our intel- 
lectual peers. Civil engineers will tell you that in 
a score or two of years, after bright Chinese youth 
have had access to schools of technology equal to 
those of the West, there will be no place in the 
engineering and technical work of the Far East 
for the high-priced white expert. In Shanghai, 
too, the clever Chinese are learning to play the 
game. I am told they are rapidly getting into 
their hands, banking, coast-wise navigation, the 
cotton trade and other branches by which the for- 
eigners there make their money; indeed, some 
deem it only a matter of time when white men will 
be unable to make a living by trade on the Chinese 
coast, having been frozen out there as they are 
being frozen out in Japan. 

To forty-three men who, as educators, mission- 
aries and diplomats, have had good opportunity to 
learn the "feel" of the Chinese mind, I put the 
question, ' ' Do you find the intellectual capacity of 
the yellow race equal to that of the white race?" 
All but five answered "Yes," and one sinologue 
of varied experience as missionary, university 
president and legation adviser left me gasping 
with the statement, "Most of us who have spent 
twenty-five years or more out here come to feel 
that the yellow race is the normal human type, 
while the white race is a 'sport.' " The trend of 
opinion is that when the Chinese have become 



62 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

equipped with the Western arts and sciences they 
will match us in intellectual performance, although 
some think that the gap in ability between the 
masses and the higher classes is much wider than 
it is in the West. 

It is significant that superior white men of long 
residence in the Middle Kingdom often become 
too Chinese in point of view to be of much service 
to their governments. Sir Robert Hart was com- 
plained of as virtually a Chinaman. Many of the 
consular veterans in the China service are said to 
champion the Chinese way of looking at things 
as against the Western. It seems that, little by 
little, the civilization of the East invades, disarms 
and takes possession of them. In the finer 
Chinese they discover an outlook more compre- 
hensive than their own, a broader tolerance, and a 
philosophic patience that makes mock of the 
eager, impetuous West. 

The heart of the case seems to be this : 
Since the discovery of America the West-Euro- 
pean whites have overrun the West Indies, the 
Americas, Australia, Africa, the islands of the 
Sea and Southern Asia, while their East-European 
brethren have occupied Northwestern and North- 
ern Asia. During this expansion the whites have 
encountered hundreds of races and peoples before 
unknown to them; but in all this time they have 
never met a race that could successfully dispute 
their military superiority, contribute to their 
civilization, or dispense with their direction in 
political or industrial organization. Now, after 



THE EACE MIND OF THE CHINESE 63 

three centuries of such experience, during which 
the white man has grown accustomed to regarding 
himself as the undisputed sovereign of the planet, 
he makes the acquaintance of peoples in Eastern 
Asia who are, perhaps, as capable as the whites 
and who threaten to spread into areas he had 
staked off for himself. In any case it begins to 
appear that the future bearers and advancers of 
civilization will be, not the whites alone, but the 
white and the yellow races ; and the control of the 
globe will lie in the hands of two races instead of 
one. 

Practically all foreigners in China who are cap- 
able of sympathy with another race become warm 
friends of the Chinese. They are not attracted, 
as in the case of the Japanese, by charm of man- 
ner or delicacy of sentiment or beauty of art, but 
by the solid human qualities of the folk. The fact 
is, the Chinese are extremely likable and those 
who have known them longest like them best. Al- 
most invariably those who harshly disparage them 
are people who are coarse or narrow or bigoted. 

They are not a sour or sullen folk. Smile at 
them and back comes a look that puts you on a 
footing of mutual understanding. Their lively 
sense of humor is a bond that unites them to the 
foreigner. One lone traveler at a critical moment 
in a Chinese street seized the ringleader of the 
mob and tied him by his queue to a door-post. The 
crowd howled with laughter, while the traveler 
slipped away. Another foreigner of unusual 



64 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

stature found he could always get on good terms 
with a crowd by flinging out his arm over the head 
of the nearest native. The bystanders grinned at 
the contrast and their good nature asserted itself. 

Horrible deeds have been wrought by Chinese 
mobs, but not one whit worse than the atrocities 
committed by mobs of our ancestors in the Middle 
Ages. In view of their ignorance and supersti- 
tion, indeed, the Chinese masses are on a level with 
our forefathers in the days of witchcraft, Jew- 
baiting, the dancing-mania, and the flagellants. 
In view of their limited schooling, one marvels at 
the diffusion among them of a politeness without 
a taint of servility. For all their illiteracy, the 
common people keenly appreciate good form ; and 
the traveler who approaches them with the man- 
ners they understand finds few too ignorant or too 
uncouth to meet him half way. 

Nothing is more creditable to the domestic 
organization of the Chinese than the attractive 
old people it produces. The old women, it is true, 
are not so frequently a success as the old men. 
The years of pain from their bound feet and the 
crosses they have had to bear as women too often 
sour the temper, and kindly-faced grannies seem 
by no means so common as with us. The natural 
result of steadily giving one sex the worst of it 
is a distressing crop of village shrews. On the 
other hand, I have never seen old faces more 
dignified, serene and benevolent than I have met 
with among elderly Chinese farmers. Often it 
seems as if the soul behind the countenance, purged 



THE EACE MIND OF THE CHINESE 65 

of every selfish thought, had come to dwell wholly 
in the welfare of others. The rights of the parent 
are such that every man with grandsons is prac- 
tically endowed with an old age pension. Hence 
you notice more smooth brows, calm eyes and care- 
free faces among old Chinese farmers than among 
old American farmers. 

In general I hold Western individualism supe- 
rior, for both individual and social advancement, 
to Chinese f amilism. I rejoice that with us a man 
is free to decide, to act, to rise without being ham- 
pered by a host of relatives. I am glad that he 
is legally responsible only for his own misdeeds, 
never for the misdeeds of his kinsman. Still, I 
believe we have gone too far in emancipating 
grown children from obligations to their parents. 
Too often among us old age is clouded up by the 
depressing sense of being shelved and being a 
burden. Chinese ethics gives the parent more 
rights and lays upon the sons more duties. Com- 
ing on the up-curve of life the duties are easy to 
bear, while, coming on the down-curve of life, the 
corresponding rights are a real solace. In a word, 
the added happiness to the old folks far outweighs 
the inconvenience to the sons. It is not easy to 
sweeten and brighten old age, and the success of 
the Chinese ought to inspire in us a doubt about 
our practical family ethics. 

The high capacity of the sons of Han is no 
guarantee that they are destined to play a bril- 
liant role in the near future. Misunderstanding 



66 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

the true causes of our. success their naive intel- 
lectuals who have traveled or studied abroad often 
imagine that a wholesale adoption of Western 
methods and institutions would, almost at once, 
lift their countrymen to the plane of wealth, power 
and popular intelligence occupied by the leading 
peoples of the "West. Now, the fact is that if by 
the waving of a wand all Chinese could be turned 
into eager progressives willing to borrow every 
good thing, it would still be long before the indi- 
vidual Chinaman attained the efficiency, comfort 
and social and political value of the West-Euro- 
pean or American. For there is no doubt that 
the foundations of our advancement are more 
economic than we think, and that we attribute to 
our institutions much prosperity that is really due 
to the fewness of our people in relation to the 
economic opportunities. Conversely, much of the 
backwardness and misery in China that we charge 
to the shortcomings of its civilization and insti- 
tutions is due simply to too many people trying 
to live from a given area. 

If this is so, it is idle to expect Chinese society 
to take on the general appearance of Western 
society until there has occurred a far-reaching 
readjustment between population and opportuni- 
ties. On the one hand, the Chinese will have to 
build railroads, open mines, sink petroleum wells, 
harness water-power, erect mills, adopt machin- 
ery, reforest their mountains, construct irrigation 
works, introduce better breeds of domestic animals 
and plants, and apply science to the production of 



X 



THE EACE MIND OF THE CHINESE 69 

food. All this economic leveling up to onr plane, 
however, would not in the least improve the qual- 
ity of Chinese life, if the increase of population 
promptly took up all the slack, as it certainly 
would do under the present social regime. At the 
end of the process there would be nothing to show 
for it all but twice as many Chinese, no better, no 
wiser, no happier than before. It is equally neces- 
sary, therefore, for the Chinese to slacken their 
multiplication by dropping ancestor worship, dis- 
solving the clan, educating girls, elevating woman, 
postponing marriage, introducing compulsory edu- 
cation, restricting child-labor and otherwise indi- 
vidualizing the members of the family. All this 
will take time ; and even if the Chinese should be 
so fortunate as to experience a smooth continuous 
social development, unbroken by reaction, foreign 
domination, or civil convulsion, it will be at best 
a couple of lifetimes before the plane of existence 
of their common people will at all approximate 
that of the common people in America. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE STBUGGLE FOE EXISTENCE IN CHINA 

IN China to-day one may observe a state of so- 
ciety the like of which has not been seen in the 
West since the Middle Ages, and which will prob- 
ably never recur on this planet. For many genera- 
tions the Chinese, loath to abandon to the careless 
plow of the stranger the graves that dot the ances- 
tral fields and reluctant to exile themselves from 
the lighted circle of civilization into the twilight of 
barbarism, have stayed at home multiplying until 
reproduction and destruction have struck a balance 
and society has entered upon the stationary stage. 
To Americans, who have had the good fortune to 
develop their life and standards in the cheerful 
presence of unlimited free land, the life and stand- 
ards of a people that for centuries have been 
crowding upon the subsistence possibilities of their 
environment cannot but seem strange and 
eccentric. 

The most arresting feature of Chinese life is 
the ruthless way in which the available natural 
resources have been made to minister to man's 
lower needs. It is true that childish superstitions 
have held back the Chinese from freely exploiting 
their mineral treasures. It is also true that from 
five to ten per cent., in some cases even twenty 

' ' 70 






THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 71 

per cent,, of the farms is given up to the grave- 
mounds of ancestors. But, aside from these 
cases, the earth is utilized as perhaps it never has 
been elsewhere. Little land lies waste in high- 
ways. Throughout the rice zone the roads are 
mere footpaths, one to three feet wide, yet the 
greedy farmers nibble away at the roads on both 
sides until the undermined paving-stones tilt and 
sink dismally into the paddy-fields. Pasture or 
meadow there is none, for land is too precious to 
be used in growing food for animals. Even on the 
boulder-strewn steeps there is no grazing save for 
goats ; for where a cow can crop herbage a man 
can grow a hill of corn. The cows and the water- 
buffaloes never taste grass except when they are 
taken out on a tether by an old granny and allowed 
to browse by the roadside and the ditches, or along 
the terraces of the rice fields. 

The traveler who in dismay at stories of the 
dirt, vermin and stenches of native inns plans to 
camp in the cleanly open is incredulous when he is 
told that there is no room to pitch a tent. Yet 
such is the case in two-thirds of China. He will 
find no roadside, no commons, no waste land, no 
pasture, no groves nor orchards, not even a door- 
yard or a cow-pen. Save the threshing-floor every 
outdoor spot fit to spread a blanket on is growing 
something. But, if he will pay, he may pitch his 
tent in a submerged rice-field, in the midst of a 
bean-patch, or among the hills of sweet potatoes ! 

In one sense it is true that China is cultivated 
"like a garden," for every lump is broken up, 



72 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

every weed is destroyed, and every plant is tended 
like a baby. As one crop approaches maturity 
another is made ready, the new crop often being 
planted between the rows of the crop that is not 
yet gathered. So far, however, as the word 
"garden" calls up visions of beauty and delight, 
it does not apply. In county after county you will 
not see altogether a rood of land reserved for 
recreation or pleasure. No village green, no 
lawns, no flower-beds nor ornamental shrubbery, 
no parks, and very few shade trees. Aside from 
the groves about the temples, the trees that relieve 
the landscape are grown for use and not for orna- 
ment. To be sure, there are men of fortune in 
inner China, but they are relatively very few. I 
doubt, indeed, if one family in two thousand boasts 
a garden with its fern-crowned rockery and its 
lotus pond overhung by drooping willows and 
feathery bamboos. One is struck, too, with the 
rarity of grape-arbors, vineyards, orchards, and 
orange groves. In the country markets one sees 
mountains of vegetables, but only a few paltry 
baskets of flavorless fruit. The demand for lux- 
uries that appeal to the palate is too slight, the 
call for sustaining food is too imperious, to with- 
draw much land from its main business, which is 
to grow rice and beans and wheat and garlic to 
keep the people alive. 

To win new plots for tillage human sweat has 
been poured out like water. Clear to the top the 
foothills have been carved into terraced fields. 
On a single slope I counted forty-seven such fields 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 73 

running up like the steps of a Brobdingnagian 
staircase. And the river-bed five hundred feet 
below, between the thin streams that wander over 
it until the autumn rains cover it with a turbid 
flood, has been smoothed and diked into hundreds 
of gemlike paddy-fields green with the young- 
rice. In the mountains, where the mantle of 
brown soil covering the rocks is too thin to be 
sculptured into level fields, the patches of wheat 
and corn follow the natural slope and the hoe must 
be used instead of the plow. Two such plots have 
I seen at a measured angle of forty-five degrees, 
and any number tilted at least forty degrees from 
the horizontal. From their huts near the wooded 
top of the range half a mile above you men clam- 
ber down and cultivate Lilliputian patches of earth 
lodged in pockets among the black naked rocks. 
Of course the wash from these deforested and 
tilled mountain flanks is appalling. A thousand 
feet below, the Heilung, the Han, or the Kialing, 
slate-hued or tawny when it should be emerald, 
prophesies of the time when all this exposed soil 
will be useless bars in the river, and the mountain 
will lie stripped of the fertile elements slowly ac- 
cumulated through geologic time. Indeed one 
hears with a shudder of districts where the thing 
has run its course to the bitter end. Mountains 
dry gray skeletons ; the rich valley bottoms buried 
under silt and gravel ; the population dwindled to 
one family in four square miles ! 

Nowhere can the watcher of man's struggle 
with his environment find a more wonderful 

4 



74 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

spectacle than meets the eye from a certain seven- 
thousand-foot pass amid the great tangle of 
mountains in West China that gives birth to the 
Han, the Wei, and the rivers that make famed 
Szechuan the "Four-river province." Save 
where steepness or rock-outcropping forbids, the 
slopes are cultivated from the floor of the Tung 
Ho Valley right up to the summits five thousand 
feet above. In this vertical mile there are dif- 
ferent crops for different altitudes — vegetables 
below, then corn, lastly wheat. Sometimes the 
very apex of the mountain wears a green peaked 
cap of rye. The aerial farms are crumpled into 
the great folds of the mountains and their borders 
follow with a poetic grace the outthrust or in- 
curve of the slopes. In this colossal amphi- 
theater one beholds a thousand fields but only 
two houses. Here and there, however, one de- 
tects in a distant yellow bank a row of dark, 
arched openings like gopher holes. It is a rural 
village, for most of these highlanders carve their 
habitations out of the dry tenacious loess. 

The heart-breaking labor of redeeming and 
tilling these upper slopes that require a climb of 
some thousands of feet from one's cave home is 
a sure sign of population pressure. It calls up 
the picture of a swelling human lake, somehow 
without egress from the valley, rising and rising 
until it fairly lifts cultivation over the summits of 
the mountains. In June these circling tiers of 
verdant undulating sky-farms are an impressive, 
even a beautiful sight ; yet one cannot help think- 




Cave dwelling of a coal miner 




Perfected tillage of the valley of an affluent 
of the Wei River 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 77 

ing of the grim, ever-present menace of hunger 
which alone could have forced people to such 
prodigies of toil. 

Eice will thrive only under a thin sheet of 
water. A rice field must, therefore, be level and 
enclosed by a low dyke. Where the climate is 
friendly the amount of labor that will be spent in 
digging a slope into rice-fields and carrying a 
stream to them is beyond belief. In one case I 
noticed how a deep-notched rocky ravine in the 
flank of a rugged mountain had been completely 
transformed. The peasants had brought down 
countless basketfuls of soil from certain pockets 
at the foot of the cliffs. With this they had filled 
the bottom of the V, floated it into a series of 
levels, banked them, set them out with rice and 
led the water over them. So that now instead of 
a barren gulch there is a staircase of curving 
fields, perhaps four rods wide and differing in 
level by the height of a man. I have also seen 
the sides of a gully in which a child could not stand 
undiscovered cut into shelves for making a string 
of rice plots no larger than a table-cloth, irrigated 
by a trickle no bigger than a baby's finger. One 
of these toy plots, duly banked and set out with 
nineteen rice plants at the regulation eight inches, 
could be covered by a dinner napkin ! 

Were it not for an agriculture of infinite pains- 
taking, the fertility of the soil would have been 
spent ages ago. In a low-lying region like 
Kiangsu, for example, the farmer digs an oblong 
settling basin into which every part of his farm 



78 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

drains. In the spring from its bottom lie scoops 
for fertilizer the rich muck washed from his fields. 
It is true the overflow from this pond carries away 
some precious elements, but these he recovers by- 
dredging the private canal that connects him with 
the main artery of the district. In the loess belt 
of North China the farmer simply digs a pit in 
the midst of his field and scatters the yellow earth 
from it as a manure. A Chinese city has no 
sewers nor does it greatly need them. Long be- 
fore sunrise tank-boats from the farms have crept 
through the city by a network of canals, and by 
the time the foreigner has finished his morning 
coffee a legion of scavengers has collected for the 
encouragement of the crops that which we cast 
into our sewers. After a rain countrymen with 
buckets prowl about the streets scooping black 
mud out of hollows and gutters or dipping liquid 
filth from the wayside sinks. A highway trav- 
ersed by two hundred carts a day is as free from 
filth as a garden path, for the neighboring 
farmers patrol it constantly with basket and rake. 
No natural resource is too trifling to be turned 
to account by a teeming population. The sea is 
raked and strained for edible plunder. Sea- 
weed and kelp have a place in the larder. Great 
quantities of shell-fish no bigger than one's finger- 
nail are opened and made to yield a food that finds 
its way far inland. The fungus that springs up 
in the grass after a rain is eaten. Fried sweet 
potato vines furnish the poor man's table. The 
roadside ditches are bailed out for the sake of 



THE STEUGGLE FOE EXISTENCE 79 

fishes no longer than one's finger. Great pan- 
niers of strawberries, half of them still green, 
are collected in the mountain ravines and offered 
in the markets. No weed nor stalk escapes the 
bamboo rake of the autumnal fuel gatherer. 
The sickle reaps the grain close to the ground, 
for straw and chaff are needed to burn un- 
der the rice kettle. The leaves of the trees 
are a crop to be carefully gathered by the chil- 
dren. One never sees a rotting stump or a molder- 
ing log. Bundles of brush carried miles on the hu- 
man back heat the brick kiln and the potter's 
furnace. After the last trees have been taken, 
the far and forbidding heights are scaled by lads 
with ax and mattock to cut down or dig up the 
seedlings that would, if left alone, reclothe the 
devastated ridges. We asked a Szechuanese if 
he did not admire a certain craggy peak with 
gnarled pines clinging to it. "No," he replied, 
"how can it be beautiful when it is so steep that 
we cannot get at the trees to cut them down?" 
Such facts helped me understand why a match 
from the native factories at Taiyuanfu and 
Sianfu has in it perhaps a third as much wood as 
one of our matches. 

The cuisine of China is one of the toothsome 
cuisines of the world ; but for the common people 
the stomach and not the palate decides what shall 
be food. The silkworms are eaten after the 
cocoon has been unwound from them. After 
their work is done horses, donkeys, mules, and 
camels become butcher's meat. The cow or pig 



80 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

that has died a natural death is not disdained. 
A missionary who had always let his cook dispose 
of a dead calf noticed that his calves always died. 
Finally he saturated the carcass of the calf with 
carbolic acid and made the cook bury it. There- 
after his calves lived. In Canton rats and cats 
are exposed for sale. Our boatmen cleaned and 
ate the head, feet, and entrails of the fowls used 
by our cook. Scenting a possible opening for a 
tannery, the Governor of Hong Kong once set on 
foot an inquiry as to what becomes of the skins 
of the innumerable pigs slaughtered in the colony. 
He learned that they are all made up as "marine 
delicacy" and sold among the Chinese. Another 
time he was on the point of ordering the extermi^ 
nation of the mangy curs that infest the villages 
in the Kowloon district because they harassed 
the Sikh policemen in the performance of their 
duties. He found just in time that such an act 
would "interfere with the food of the people," 
something a British colonial governor must never 
do. 

Though the farmer thriftily combs his harvest 
field, every foot of the short stubble is gone over 
again by poor women and children, who are con- 
tent if in a day's gleaning they can gather a 
handful of wheat heads to keep them alive the 
morrow. On the Hong Kong water front the path 
of the coolies carrying produce between ware- 
house and junk is lined with tattered women, 
most of them with a baby on the back. Where 
bags of beans or rice are in transit a dozen wait 




Junk on the Yangtse 




Fishing with cormorants 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 83 

with basket and brush to sweep up the grains 
dropped from the sacks. On a wharf where crude 
sugar is being repacked squat sixty women scrap- 
ing the inside of the discarded sacks, while others 
run by the bearer, if his sack leaks a little, to 
catch the particles as they fall. Where sugar is 
being unloaded, a mob of gleaners swarm upon 
the lighter the moment the last sack leaves and 
eagerly scrape from the gang-plank and the deck 
the sugar mixed with dirt that for two hours has 
been trampled into a muck by the bare feet of 
two score coolies trotting back and forth across 
a dusty road ! 

The pilferings one hears of are hardly less 
significant than are the gleanings. The Peking- 
Hankow Railway complains of the nightly theft 
of ringbolts and plates; no fewer than 60,000 
bolts a month and 10,000 plates per annum dis- 
appear, to be made into razors and scissors, hoes 
and ploughshares. The cook will extract half its 
strength from soup meat and then sell it through 
his window to an itinerant food vender. From 
the daily drawing of tea given him he will ab- 
stract a few leaves and hide them. When he has 
accumulated a pound he will get the dealer to de- 
liver this pound and give him part of the money 
his mistress pays for the stolen pound. Even 
the old hair that hangs in tatters from the camels 
when they are changing their coat is subject to 
theft. 

Haunted by the fear of starving, men spend 
themselves recklessly for the sake of a wage. It 



84 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

is true that the Chinese are still in the handicraft 
stage and the artisans one sees busy on their 
own account in the little workshops along the 
street go their own gait. The smiths in iron, tin, 
copper, brass and silver, the carvers of ivory, 
amber, tortoise-shell, onyx and jade, the workers 
in wood, rattan, lacquer, wax, and feathers, the 
weavers of linen, cotton, and silk seem, in spite 
of their long hours, less breathless and driven, 
less prodigal in their expenditure of life energy, 
than many of the operatives in our machine in- 
dustries who feel the spur of piece wage, team 
work, and " speeding up." Still, it is obvious 
that in certain occupations men are literally kill- 
ing themselves by their exertions. The treadmill- 
coolies who propel the stern-wheelers on the West 
River admittedly shorten their lives. Nearly all 
the lumber used in China is hand-sawed, and the 
sawyers are exhausted early. The planers of 
boards, the marble polishers, the brass filers, the 
cotton Suffers, the treaders who work the big 
rice-polishing pestles are building their coffins. 
Physicians agree that carrying coolies rarely live 
beyond forty-five or fifty years. The term of a 
chair-bearer is eight years, of a ricksha runner 
four years; for the rest of his life he is an in- 
valid. Moreover, carriers and chair-bearers are 
afflicted with varicose veins and aneurisms be- 
cause the constant tension of the muscles inter- 
feres with the return circulation of the blood. A 
lady physician in Fokien who had examined some 
scores of carrying coolies told me she found but 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 85 

two who were free from the heart trouble caused 
by burden-bearing. 

In Canton, city of a million without a wheel or 
a beast of burden, even the careless eye marks in 
the porters that throng the streets the plain signs 
of overstrain: faces pale and haggard, with the 
drawn and flat look of utter exhaustion ; eyes pain- 
pinched, or astare and unseeing with supreme ef- 
fort; jaw sagging and mouth open from weariness. 
The dog trot, the whistling breath, the clenched 
teeth, the streaming face of those under a burden 
of one to two hundredweight that must be borne 
are as eloquent of ebbing life as a jetting artery. 
At rest the porter often leans or droops with a 
corpse-like sag that betrays utter depletion of vital 
energy. In a few years the face becomes a 
wrinkled, pain-stiffened mask, the veins of the 
upper leg stand out like great cords, a frightful 
net of varicose veins blemishes the calf, lumps 
appear at the back of the neck or down the spine, 
and the shoulders are covered with thick pads of 
callous under a livid skin. Inevitably the chil- 
dren of the people are drawn into these cogs at 
the age of ten or twelve, and not one boy in eight 
can be spared till he has learned to read. 

There are a number of miscellaneous facts that 
hint how close the masses live to the edge of sub- 
sistence. The brass cash, the most popular coin 
in China, is worth the twentieth of a cent ; but as 
this has been found too valuable to meet all the 
needs of the people, oblong bits of bamboo circu- 
late in some provinces at the value of half a cash. 



86 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

A Western firm that wishes to entice the masses 
with its wares must make a grade of extra cheap- 
ness for the China trade. The British-American 
Tobacco Company puts up a package of twenty 
cigarettes that sells for two cents. The Stand- 
ard Oil Company sells by the million a lamp that 
costs eleven cents and retails, chimney and all, for 
eight-and-a-half cents. It is a curious fact, by 
the way, that the oil of its rival, the Asiatic Oil 
Company, does not burn well in this cunningly 
devised lamp! Incredibly small are the portions 
prepared for sale by the huckster. • Two cubic 
inches of bean curd, four walnuts, five peanuts, 
fifteen roasted beans, twenty melon seeds — make 
a portion. The melon vender's stand is decked 
out with wedges of insipid melon the size of two 
fingers. The householder leaves the butcher's 
stall with a morsel of pork, the pluck of a fowl 
and a strip of fish as big as a sardine, tied together 
with a blade of grass. In Anhwei the query cor- 
responding to "How do you make your living?" 
is "How do you get through the day?" On tak- 
ing leave of his host it is manners for the guest to 
thank him expressly for the food he has provided. 
Careful observers say that four-fifths of the con- 
versation among the co mm on Chinese relates to 
food. 

Comfort is scarce as well as food. The city 
coolie sleeps on a plank in an airless kennel on 
a filthy lane with a block for a pillow and a quilt 
for a cover. When in a South China hospital all 
the beds were provided with springs and mat- 







3 



THE STEUGGLE FOE EXISTENCE 89 

tresses supplied by a philanthropic American, all 
the patients were found next morning sleeping 
on the floor. After being used to boards covered 
with a mat they could not get their proper slumber 
on a soft bed. 

Necessity makes the wits fertile in devising new 
ways of earning a living. I have heard of persons 
keeping themselves alive by hiring themselves to 
incubate hen's eggs by their bodily warmth. In 
some localities people place about the floors of 
their sleeping and living rooms flea traps, i. e., tiny 
joints of bamboo with a bit of aromatic glue at 
the bottom which attracts and holds fast the 
vermin. Eecently in Szechuan — where there is a 
proverb, "The sooner you get a son the sooner 
you get happiness" — some wight has been enter- 
prising enough to begin going about from house to 
house cleaning the dead fleas and dried glue from 
the traps and recharging them with fresh glue. 
For this service he charges each house one- 
twentieth of a cent. 

The great number hanging on to existence "by 
the eyelashes" and dropping into the abyss at a 
gossamer's touch cheapens life. "Yan to meng 
ping," "Many men, life cheap," reply the West 
Eiver watermen when reproached for leaving a 
sick comrade on the foreshore to die. In a 
thronged six-foot street I beheld a shriveled, hor- 
ribly twisted leper prone on his back hitching him- 
self along sideways inch by inch and imploring 
the by-passers to drop alms into his basket. It 
contained four cash! In the leper village of 



90 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

Canton the government furnishes two cents a day 
which will buy two bowls of cooked rice. For 
their other needs they must beg. Ax and bamboo 
are retained and prison reform is halted by the 
consideration that, unless the way of the trans- 
gressor is made flinty, there are people miserable 
enough to commit crime for the bare sake of 
prison fare. Not long ago the Commissioner of 
Customs at a great South-China port — a foreigner, 
of course — impressed by the fact that every 
summer the bubonic plague there carried off about 
ten thousand Chinese, planned a rigid quarantine 
against those ports from which the plague was 
liable to be brought. When he sought the co- 
operation of the Chinese authorities, the taotai 
objected on the ground that there were too many 
Chinese anyway, and that, by thinning them out 
and making room for the rest, the plague was 
a blessing in disguise. The project was dropped 
and last summer again the plague ravaged the 
city like a fire. But the taotai was not unreason- 
able. After all, it is better to die quickly by 
plague than slowly by starvation; and, as things 
now are, if fewer Chinese perish by disease more 
would be swept away by famine. 

In a press so desperate, if a man stumbles he 
is not likely to get up again. I have heard of 
several cases where an employe dismissed for 
incompetence or fault returned starving again and 
again, because nowhere could he find work. In 
China you should move slowly in getting rid of 
an incompetent. Euthless dismissal, such as we 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 91 

tolerate, is bitterly resented and leads to extreme 
unpopularity. Again, no one attempts to stand 
alone, seeing the lone man is almost sure to go 
under. The son of Han dares not cut himself off 
from his family, his clan, or his guild, for they 
throw him the life-line by which he can pull him- 
self up if his foot slips. Students in the schools 
are strong in mass action — strikes, walkouts, etc., 
— for their action, however silly or perverse, is 
always unanimous. The sensible lad never thinks 
of holding out against the folly of his fellows. 
The whole bidding of his experience has been, 
"Conform or starve." Likewise no duty is im- 
pressed like that of standing by your kinsmen. 
The official, the arsenal superintendent, or the 
business manager of a college, when he divides 
the jobs within his gift among his poor relations, 
is obeying the most imperative ethics he knows. 

It is an axiom with the Chinese that anything 
is better than a fight. They urge compromise even 
upon the wronged man and blame him who con- 
tends stubbornly for all his rights. This dread 
of having trouble is reasonable under their cir- 
cumstances. "When a boat is so crowded that the 
gunwale is scarce a hand's breadth above the 
water, a scuffle must be avoided at all costs, and 
each is expected to put up with a great deal be- 
fore breaking the peace. 

In their outlook on life most Chinese are rank 
materialists. They ply the stranger with ques- 
tions as to his income, his means, the cost of his 
belongings. They cannily offer paper money in- 



92 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

stead of real money at the graves of their dead, 
and sacrifice paper images of the valuables that 
once were burned in the funeral pyre. They pray 
only for material benefits, never for spiritual bless- 
ings; and they compare shrewdly the luck-bring- 
ing powers of different josses and altars. Some 
sorry little backwoods shrine will get a reputation 
for answering prayer and presently there will be 
half a cord of gratitude tablets heaped about it, 
testimonials to its success. If a drouth continues 
after fervent prayers for rain, the resentful peo- 
ple smash the idol! Yet no one who comes into 
close touch with the Chinese deems this utilitarian- 
ism a race trait. They are capable of the highest 
idealism. Among the few who have come near to 
the thought of Buddha or Jesus one finds faces 
saintlike in their glow of spirituality. The 
materialism is imposed by hard economic con- 
ditions. It is the product of an age-long anxiety 
about to-morrow's rice and not to be counter- 
acted by the influence of the petty proportion 
whose circumstances lift them above sordid anx- 
ieties. 

Contrary to the theory of certain sociologists 
this intensified struggle for life has no perceptible 
effect in promoting economic or social improve- 
ment. It is a static rather than a dynamic in- 
fluence. It makes for exertion and strain but not 
for progress because the prime means of progress 
are inventions and discoveries, and it is just these 
that bond-slaves to poverty, under the stress of the 
struggle to keep alive, are not able to bring forth. 




One of the three life-boats that 
escorted us through the gorges 




An ancient mariner 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 95 

Most of the stock explanations of national 
poverty throw no light on the condition of 
the Chinese. They are not impoverished by the 
niggardliness of the soil, for China is one of 
the most bountiful seats occupied by man. Their 
state is not the just recompense of sloth, for no 
people is better broken to heavy, unremitting toil. 
The trouble is not lack of intelligence in their 
work, for they are skilful farmers and clever in 
the arts and crafts. Nor have they been dragged 
down into their pit of wolfish competition by waste- 
ful vices. Opium-smoking and gambling do, in- 
deed, ruin many a home, but it is certain that, 
even for untainted families and communities, the 
plane of living is far lower than in the West. 
They are not victims of the rapacity of their 
rulers, for if their government does little for them, 
it exacts little. In good times its fiscal claims are 
far from crushing. With four times our numbers 
the national budget is a fifth of ours. The basic 
conditions of prosperity — liberty of person and 
security of property — are well established. There 
is, to be sure, no security for industrial invest- 
ments ; but property in land and in goods is reason- 
ably well protected. Nor is the lot of the masses 
due to exploitation. In the cities there is a sprin- 
kling of rich, but out in the province one may 
travel for weeks and see no sign of a wealthy class 
— no mansion or fine country place, no costume 
or equipage befitting the rich. There are great 
stretches of fertile agricultural country where the 
struggle for subsistence is stern and yet the culti- 



96 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

vator owns Ms land and implements and pays 
tribute to no man. 

For a grinding mass poverty that cannot be 
matched in the Occident there remains but one 
general cause, namely, the crowding of population 
upon the means of subsistence. Why this people 
should so behave more than other peoples, why 
this gifted race should so recklessly multiply as 
to condemn itself to a sordid struggle for a bare 
existence can be understood only when one un- 
derstands the constitution of the Chinese family. 

It is believed that unless twice a year certain 
rites are performed and paper money is burned 
at a man's grave by a male descendant, his spirit 
and the spirits of his fathers will wander forlorn 
in the spirit world "begging rice" of other spirits. 
Hence Mencius taught "there are three things 
which are unfilial ; and to have no posterity is the 
greatest of them." It is a man's first concern, 
therefore, to assure the succession in the male line. 
He not only wants a number of sons, but — since life 
is not long in China and the making of a suitable 
match for a son is the parent's prerogative — he 
wants to see his son settled as soon as possible. 
Before his son is twenty-one he provides him with 
a wife as a matter of course, and the young couple 
live with him till the son can fend for himself. 
There is none of our feeling that a young man 
should not marry till he can support a family. 
This wholesome pecuniary check on reproduction 
seems wholly wantiug. The son's marriage is 
the parents ' affair, not his ; for they pick the girl 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 97 

and provide the home. In the colleges one out of 
twenty or ten, but sometimes even one out of five 
of the students is married, and not infrequently 
there are fathers among the members of the gradu- 
ating class. 

As the bride must be younger than the groom, 
early marriage for sons makes early marriage 
for daughters. The average age of Chinese girls 
at marriage appears to be sixteen or seventeen 
years, although some put it at fifteen. In the cities 
reached by foreign influence, the age has advanced. 
In Peking it is said to be eighteen, in Shanghai 
twenty, in Wuchow twenty, in Swatow sixteen to 
eighteen, in Chungking seventeen or eighteen 
where formerly it was fourteen or fifteen. 
Schooling, too, postpones marriage to about 
twenty, but not one girl in two thousand is in a 
grammar school. About two years ago the Board 
of Education at Peking ruled that students in the 
government schools should not marry under 
twenty in the case of girls and twenty-two in the 
case of boys. 

At twenty practically all girls, save prostitutes, 
are wives and five-sixths of the young men are 
husbands. This means that in the Orient the 
generations come at least a third closer together 
than they do in the Occident. Even if their 
average family were no larger than ours, they 
can outbreed us, for they get in four generations 
while we are rearing three. But their families 
are larger because their production of children is 
not affected by certain considerations which weigh 



98 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

with us. Clan ties are so strong that if a poor 
man cannot feed his children he can get fellow 
clansmen to adopt some of them. Thanks to an- 
cestor worship and to reliance on sons for support 
in old age, there is a great deal more adopting 
than we can imagine. In fact, the demand for 
boys to be adopted by couples who have no son has 
been eager enough to call into being a brisk kid- 
napping trade that is giving trouble to the 
Shanghai authorities. Then there are funds left 
by bygone clansmen for the relief of necessitous 
members. These stimulate procreative reckless- 
ness precisely as did the parish relief guaranteed 
under the old Poor Law of England. 

The burden of the child on the parent is lighter 
than with us, while the benefit expected from the 
male child is much greater. Lacking our op- 
portunities for saving and investment, the Chinese 
rely upon the earnings of their sons to keep them 
in their old age. A man looks upon his sons as his 
old age pension. A girl baby may be drowned 
or sold, a boy never. In a society so patriarchal 
that a teacher forty years old With a family still 
turns over his monthly salary to his father as a 
matter of common duty, the parents of one son 
are pitied while the parents of many sons are 
congratulated. 

Moreover, the very atmosphere of China is 
charged with appreciation of progeny. From 
time immemorial the things considered most 
worth while have been posterity, learning and 
riches — in the order named. This judgment of 




Braving the Yangtse flood. Cliff swallows' 
nests at Chungking 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 101 

a remote epoch when there was room for all sur- 
vives into a time when the land groans under 
its burden of population. So a man is still envied 
for the number of descendants in the male line 
who will walk in his funeral train. Grandchil- 
dren, and, still more, great-grandchildren, are 
counted the especial blessing of heaven. 

Hence a veritable passion to have offspring — 
more offspring — as many as possible. In Kuang- 
tung I am told that the women are so eager for 
many children that they place their suckling with 
a wet nurse so as to shorten the interval between 
conceptions. In the West there are plenty of par- 
ents willing to unload their superfluous children 
upon an institution, whereas a Chinese parent 
never gives up a male child till he is in sore straits 
and reclaims it the moment he is able. The boy 
is a partly-paid-up old age endowment policy 
that shall not lapse if he can help it. What chil- 
dren's home with us would dare undertake, as 
does the Asile de la Sainte Enfance among 320,- 
000 Chinese in Hong Kong, to care for all children 
offered and to give them back at the parents ' con- 
venience ? 

With us a rich man may not lawfully beget 
and rear more children than one wife can bear 
him. In China, however, the concubine has a legal 
status, her issue is legitimate and a man may con- 
tribute to the population his children by as many 
women as he cares to take to himself. With us 
one-sixth of the women between thirty and thirty- 
five are unmarried, while in China not one woman 



102 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

in a thousand remains a spinster, so that nearly 
all the female reproductive capacity of each gen- 
eration is utilized in child bearing. 

Thus all things conspire to encourage the 
Chinese to multiply freely without paying heed to 
the economic prospect. Their domestic system is 
a snare, yet no Malthus has ever startled China 
out of her deep satisfaction with her domestic sys- 
tem. She believes that, whatever may be wrong 
with her, her family is all right; and dreams of 
teaching the anarchic West filial piety and true 
propriety in the relations of the sexes. It has 
never occurred to the thinkers of the yellow race 
that the rate of multiplication is one of the great 
factors in determining the plane on which the 
masses live. Point out this axiom of political 
economy to a scholar and he meets it with such 
comforting saws as, "One more bowlful out of 
a big rice tub makes no difference," "There is 
always food for a chicken," "The only son will 
starve" (i.e., will be a ne'er-do-well). Or he may 
argue that there can be no relation between density 
and poverty by citing big villages in which people 
are better off than in neighboring little villages ! 

If people will blindly breed when there is no 
longer room to raise more food, the penalty must 
fall somewhere. The deaths will somehow con- 
trive to balance the births. It is a mercy that in 
China the strain comes in the years of infancy, in- 
stead of later on dragging down great numbers 
of adults into a state of semi-starvation until they 
are thinned out sufficiently. The mortality among 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 103 

infants is well-nigh incredible. This woman has 
borne eleven children, and all are dead; that one 
is the mother of seven, all dying young; another 
has only two left out of eleven, another, four left 
out of twelve. Such were the cases that occurred 
offhand to my informants. One missionary can- 
vassed his district and found that nine children 
out of ten never grew up. Dr. McCartney of 
Chungking, after twenty years of practice there, 
estimates that seventy-five to eighty-five per cent, 
of the children born in that region die before the 
end of the second year. The returns from Hcmg 
Kong for 1909 show that the number of children 
dying under one year of age is eighty-seven per 
cent, of the number of births reported within the 
year. The first census of the Japanese in For- 
mosa seems to show that nearly half of the chil- 
dren born to the Chinese there die within six 
months. 

Not all this appalling loss is the result of 
poverty. The proportion of weakly infants is 
large, probably owing to the immaturity of the 
mothers. The use of milk is unknown in China 
and so the babe that cannot be suckled is doomed. 
Even when it can, the ignorant mother starts it 
too early on adult food. In some parts they kill 
many by stuffing the mouth of the tender infant 
with a certain indigestible cake. The slaughter 
of the innocents by mothers who know nothing of 
how to care for the child is ghastly. And yet 
so necessary is this loss in order to keep numbers 
down to the food supply that more than one phy- 



104 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

sician endorsed the remark of a medical mis- 
sionary: that the doctor who should get these 
mothers together and teach them how to save their 
babies would be assuming a very grave responsi- 
bility! 

Still, much of the child mortality is the direct 
consequence of economic pressure. A girl is only 
a burden, for she marries before she is of use to 
her parents and is lost into her husband's family. 
Only in default of male children may she invite her 
parents to live with her husband and herself. 
Small wonder, then, that not infrequently the 
female infant is murdered at birth. Again, when 
the family is already large, the parents despair of 
raising the child and it perishes from neglect. In 
Hupeh a man explaining that two of his children 
have died will say: "Tin lio Hang ~ko hai tsi," "I 
have been relieved of two children." Another 
factor is lack of sufficient good food, which also 
makes so many children very small for their age. 
The heavy losses from measles, and scarlet fever, 
are closely connected with overcrowding. 

For adults overpopulation not only spells priva- 
tion and drudgery, but it means a life averaging 
about fifteen years shorter than ours. Small 
wonder, indeed, for in some places human beings 
are so thick the earth is literally foul from them. 
Unwittingly they poison the ground, they poison 
the water, they poison the air, they poison the 
growing crops. And while most of them have 
enough to eat, little has been reserved from the 
sordid food quest. Here are people with stand- 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 105 

ards, unquestionably civilized — peaceable, indus- 
trious, filial, polite, faithful to their contracts, heed- 
ful of the rights of others. Yet their lives are 
dreary and squalid for most of their margins have 
been swept into the hopper for the production of 
population. Two coarse blue cotton garments 
clothe them. In summer the children go naked 
and the men strip to the waist. Thatched mud 
hut, no chimney, smoke-blackened walls, unglazed 
windows, rude unpainted stools, a grimy table, a 
dirt floor where the pig and the fowls dispute 
for scraps, for bed a mud hang with a frazzled mat 
on it. No woods, grass, nor flowers; no wood 
floors, carpets, curtains, wall-paper, table-cloths 
nor ornaments; no books, pictures, newspapers, 
nor musical instruments; no sports nor amuse- 
ments, few festivals or social gatherings. But 
everywhere children, naked, sprawling, squirming, 
crawling, tumbling in the dust — the one possession 
of which the poorest family has an abundance, and 
to which other possessions and interests are fa- 
natically sacrificed. 

In a census paragraph my eye catches the 
report of the headmen for a country district 
of eleven square miles in Anhwei. They re- 
turn 14,000 souls, nearly 1,200 to the square 
mile or two to the acre. Despite its quantity 
of waste land Shantung seems to have 700 to 
the square mile. Yet it would be an error to 
assume that at any given moment all parts 
of China are saturated with people. In Shansi 
thirty-odd years ago seven-tenths of the in- 



106 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

habitants perished from famine, and the vacant 
spaces and the crumbling walls that meet the 
eye show that the gaps have never been quite 
filled. Since the opening of the railroad to 
Taiyuanfu, the capital, wanderers from congested 
Shantung are filtering into the province. The 
same is true of Shensi which, besides losing five 
millions of its people in the Mohammedan uprising 
of the seventies, lost three-tenths of its people by 
famine in 1900. Kansuh, Yunnan, and Kuangsi 
have never fully recovered from the massacres 
following great rebellions, and one often comes on 
land once cultivated that has reverted to wilder- 
ness. The slaughters of the Taipings left an 
abiding mark on Kiangsu and Chekiang. Kuang- 
tung and Fokien, the maritime provinces of the 
South, have been relieved by emigration. The 
tide first set in to Formosa and California, later 
it turned to the Dutch Indies, Malaysia, Indo- 
China, Singapore, the Philippines, Burmah, Siam, 
Borneo, and Australia. About ten millions are 
settled outside of China with the result of greatly 
mitigating the struggle for existence in these prov- 
inces. Within recent years $9,000,000 have 
flowed into the Sanning district from which the 
first Kuangtung men went out to California and 
to Singapore. It has all been brought back or 
sent back by emigrants. The fine burnt-brick farm 
housec with stone foundations, the paved threshing 
floors and the stately ancestral halls that astonish 
one in the rural villages along the coast of Fokien 



g5 




a ** 

88 O 



o 

CD 
CD 



a- 

&' 

5" 

en? 




THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 109 

are due to remittances from emigrants. In the 
tiger-haunted, wooded hills thirty miles from Foo- 
chow one comes on terraces proving former culti- 
vation of soils it is no longer necessary to till. 

The near future of population in China may 
be predicted with some confidence. Within our 
time the Chinese will be served by a government 
on the Western model. Rebellions will cease, for 
grievances will be redressed in time, or else the 
standing army will nip uprising in the bud. 
When a net of railways enables a paternal gov- 
ernment to rush the surplus of one province to 
feed the starving in another, famines will end. 
The opium demon is already in the way of being 
throttled. As a feeling of security becomes 
established the confining walls of the cities will 
be razed to allow the pent-up people to spread. 
Wide streets, parks and sewers will be provided. 
Filtered water will be within reach of all. A uni- 
versity-trained medical profession will grapple 
with disease. Everywhere health officers will 
make war on plague-bearing rats and mosquitoes 
as to-day in Hong Kong. Epidemics will be fought 
with quarantine and serum and isolation hos- 
pitals. Milk will be available and district nurses 
will instruct mothers how to care for their in- 
fants. In response to such life-saving activities 
the death rate in China ought to decline from the 
present height of fifty or fifty-five per thousand 
to the point it has already reached in a modern- 
ized Japan, namely, twenty per thousand. 



110 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

But to lower the birth rate in equal degree — 
that, alas, is quite another matter. The factors 
responsible for the present fecundity of fifty to 
sixty per thousand — three times that of the Amer- 
ican stock and nowhere matched in the white 
man's world, unless it be in certain districts in 
Russia and certain parishes in French Canada — 
will not yield so readily. It may easily take the 
rest of this century to overcome ancestor worship, 
early marriage, the passion for big families and 
the inferior position of the wife. For at least 
a generation or two China will produce rapidly in 
the Oriental way people who will die off slowly 
in the Occidental way. When the death rate has 
been planed down to twenty the birth rate will 
still be more than double, and numbers will be 
growing at the rate of over two per cent, a year. 
Even with the aid of a scientific agriculture it is, 
of course, impossible to make the crops of China 
feed such an increase. It must emigrate or 
starve. It is the outward thrust of surplus 
Japanese that is to-day producing dramatic polit- 
ical results in Corea and Manchuria. In forty 
or fifty years there will come an outward thrust 
of surplus Chinese on ten times this scale. With 
a third of the adults able to read and with daily 
newspapers thrilling the remotest village with 
tidings of the great world, eighteen provinces will 
be pouring forth emigrants instead of two. To 
Mexico, Central and South America, South- 
western Asia, Asia Minor, Africa, and even old 
Europe, the black-haired bread-seekers will 



THE STRUGGLE FOE EXISTENCE 111 

stream, and then "What shall we do with the 
Chinese 1" from being in turn a Calif ornian, an 
Australian, a Canadian, and a South African 
question, will become a world question. 



CHAPTER V 

THE INDUSTRIAL FUTURE OF CHINA 

THERE are three possibilities known as the 
"yellow peril.' ' One is the swamping of 
the slow-multiplying, high-wage, white societies 
with the overflow that is bound to come when 
China has applied Western knowledge to the sav- 
ing of human life. This is real and imminent, 
and nothing but a concerted policy of exclusion 
can avert it. Another is the overmatching of 
the white people by colossal armies of well-armed 
and well-drilled yellow men who, under the in- 
spiring lead of some Oriental Bonaparte, will 
first expel the Powers from Eastern Asia and 
later overrun Europe. 

This forecast is dream-stuff. One who goes 
up and down among these teeming proletarians 
realizes that, save among the Mohammedans of 
the Northwest, the last traces of the military 
spirit evaporated long ago. The folk appear to 
possess neither the combative impulses nor the 
energy of will of the West Europeans. Chinese 
lads quarrel in a girlish way with much reviling 
but little pounding; with random flourishing of 
fists, but only when there is no danger of their 

finding the opponent's face. A row among coolies 

112 



INDUSTBIAL FUTUKE OF CHINA 113 

impresses one much more with the objurgatory 
richness of the language than with the fighting 
prowess of the race. 

Very striking is the contrast with the game- 
cock Japanese who, fresh from a military feudal- 
ism, are still full of pugnacity. At Singapore 
three thousand Chinese were detained in quaran- 
tine with three hundred Japanese. The latter 
made insolent demands such as that they be served 
their rice before the Chinese. The Celestials 
could easily have crushed this handful of brown 
men but in the end, rather than have "trouble," 
they accepted second table. Not that the Chinese 
is chicken-hearted. Indeed, there is tiger enough 
in him when aroused; but he simply does not 
believe in fighting as a way of settling disputes. 
To him it is uneconomical, hence foolish. In 
Malaya it has been observed that, no matter how 
turbulent a crowd of Chinese may become, if one 
of their headmen holds up his hand, they quiet 
down till they have heard what he has to say. 
Their tumult is calculated and they do not get 
beside themselves with rage as will a mob of 
Japanese or East Indians. 

The new army is a vast improvement, but still 
its fighting spirit may well be doubted. ' ' How do 
you like the service?" an American asked a 
couple of reservists. "Very well." "How if a 
war should break out?" "Oh, our friends will 
let us know in time so we can run away. ' ' Smart- 
ing under repeated humiliations the haughty 
Manchu princes are forging the new army as an 



114 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

instrument of revenge; but the Chinese people 
prize it as a buckler only and do not intend it 
shall take the offensive. In the officers one misses 
the martial visage, the firm chin and set jaw that 
proclaim the overriding will. The wondering look 
and the unaggressive manner of the private re- 
veals the simple country lad beneath the khaki. 
The Japanese peasant has the bold air of the 
soldier; the Chinese soldier has the mild bearing 
of the peasant. Belief that right makes might 
and that all difficulties can be settled by appeal- 
ing to the li, i. e., the Beasonable, so saturates 
Chinese thought that nothing but a succession of 
shocks that should move the national character 
from its foundation will lay them open to the 
military spirit. Long before they have lost their 
faith in peace, the Chinese will be too strong to 
be bullied and too flourishing to seek national 
prosperity through conquest. 

The third "yellow peril" is the possibility of 
an industrial conquest of the West by the Orient. 
Contemplating the diligence, sobriety and clever- 
ness of the Chinese in connection with their 
immense numbers and their low standard of 
comfort, some foresee a manufacturing China 
driving us out of neutral markets with great 
quantities of iron, steel, implements, ships, ma- 
chinery and textiles of an incredible cheapness, 
and obliging our workingmen, after a long dis- 
astrous strife with their employers, to take a 
Chinese wage or starve. Against such a calamity 
the great industrial nations will be able to protect 




The railway police at a station 




Chinese Officers 

Note lack of the determined, firm-jawed military visage 



INDUSTRIAL FUTURE OF CHINA 117 

themselves neither by immigration barriers, nor 
by tariff walls. 

Assuredly the cheapness of Chinese labor is 
something to make a factory owner's mouth 
water. The women reelers in the silk filatures 
of Shanghai get from eight to eleven cents for 
eleven hours of work. But Shanghai is dear; 
and, besides, everybody there complains that the 
laborers are knowing and spoiled. In the steel 
works at Hanyang common labor gets $3 a month, 
just a tenth of what raw Slavs command in the 
South Chicago steel works. Skilled mechanics get 
from eight to twelve dollars. In a coal mine near 
Ichang a thousand miles up the Yangtse the coolie 
receives one cent for carrying a 400-lb. load of 
coal on his back down to the river a mile and a 
half away. He averages ten loads a day but must 
rest every other week. The miners get seven 
cents a day and found; that is, a cent's worth of 
rice and meal. They work eleven hours a day up 
to their knees in water, and all have swollen legs. 
After a week of it they have to lie off a couple 
of days. No wonder the cost of this coal (semi- 
bituminous) at the pit's mouth is only thirty-five 
cents a ton. At Chengtu servants get a dollar 
and a half a month and find themselves. Across 
Szechuan lusty coolies were glad to carry our 
chairs half a day for four cents each. In Sianfu 
the common coolie gets three cents a day and feeds 
himself, or eighty cents a month. Through 
Shansi roving harvesters were earning from four 
to twelve cents a day and farm hands got five or 



118 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

six dollars a year and their keep. Speaking 
broadly, in any part of the Empire, willing labor- 
ers of fair intelligence may be had in any number 
at from eight to fifteen cents a day. 

With an ocean of such labor power to draw on, 
China would appear to be on the eve of a manu- 
facturing development that will act like a con- 
tinental upheaval in changing the trade map of 
the world. The impression is deepened by the 
tale of industries that have already sprung up. 
In twenty years the Chinese have established 
forty-six silk filatures, thirty-eight of them in 
Shanghai. More than a dozen cotton-spinning 
mills are supplying yarn to native hand looms. 
Two woolen mills are weaving cloth for soldiers' 
uniforms. In Shanghai there are pure Chinese 
factories making glass, cigarettes, yellow-bar 
soap, tooth-brushes, and roller-process flour. 
The Hanyang Iron and Steel Works — with 5,000 
men in the plant and many thousands more mining 
and transporting its ore and coal — is doubling 
its capacity, having last year contracted with an 
American syndicate to furnish annually for fif- 
teen years from 36,000 to 72,000 tons of pig-iron 
to a steel plant building at Irondale on Puget 
Sound. 

Those who judge by surfaces anticipate a de- 
velopment swift and dramatic; to our race a 
catastrophe or a blessing according as one cares 
for the millions or the millionaires. But, peer- 
ing beneath the surface, one descries certain 
factors which forbid us to believe that the in- 



INDUSTKIAL FUTUEE OF CHINA 119 

dustriai blooming of the yellow race is to occur 
in our time. 

Before flooding world markets the yellow-labor 
mills must supply the wants of the Chinese them- 
selves for manufactured goods ; and, even if, man 
for man, they have not more than a seventh of the 
buying power of Americans, China still offers a 
market more than half as large as that of the 
whole United States. Its estimated annual con- 
sumption of cotton goods would carpet a road- 
way sixty feet wide from here to the moon ! Ow- 
ing to the indefinitely expanding market Eastern 
Asia will afford for the cheap machine-made 
fabrics, utensils, implements, cutlery, toilet 
articles and time-pieces to pour forth from the 
native factories to be established, the evil day is 
yet distant when the white man's product will 
be beaten from the South American or African 
fields by the handiwork of the yellow man. 

Then production is not always so cheap as wages 
are low. For all his native capacity, the coolie will 
need a long course of schooling, industrial train- 
ing, and factory atmosphere before he inches up 
abreast of the German or American workingman. 
At a railway center in North China is a govern- 
ment establishment that imports bridge materials 
from Europe, builds up the beams, fits and 
punches them, and sends them out in knock-down 
state to the place where the bridge is needed. 
Yet, with labor five times as cheap, it cannot 
furnish iron bridges as cheaply as they can be 
imported from Belgium, which means that at pres- 



120 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

ent, one Belgian iron-worker is worth more than 
five Chinese. It will take at least a generation 
or two for the necessary technical skill to become 
hereditary among these working people. 

Active China, which is about as large as the 
United States east of the Eocky Mountains, has 
less than 7,000 miles of railway. Owing to the 
thick population and the intensive agriculture the 
traffic potency of most parts is even now so great 
that, no doubt, ten times the present mileage, if 
economically constructed and managed, would 
yield handsome dividends on the investment. 
Now, at best it would take China's spare capital 
for the next thirty years to build the railways the 
country ought to have. It must be borne in mind, 
too, that, outside a few treaty ports, the new in- 
dustries await the initiative of the Chinese. Gone 
forever are the halcyon days of Li Hung Chang's 
railway and mining concessions, when a single 
foreigner could obtain the exclusive right to mine 
coal and iron over 5,400 square miles of the rich- 
est mineral-bearing province. The rising nation- 
alism with its cry, "China for the Chinese," has 
put an end to all that. The Government has re- 
covered certain of the railway concessions and 
the people of Shansi paid the Peking Syndicate 
two-and-one-quarter millions of dollars to re- 
linquish an undeveloped concession. China will, 
no doubt, block the path of the foreign exploiter 
as carefully as Japan has, and her mills and mines 
will be Chinese or nothing. But the courage of 
the Chinese capitalist is chilled by the rapacity of 



INDUSTEIAL FUTUBE OF CHINA 121 

officials unchecked by law court or popular suf- 
frage. One of the directors of the Shanghai- 
Hangchow Railway — a purely Chinese line — tells 
me their chief trouble in building the road was 
the harassing ''inspections" which obliged them 
to bribe the officials in order to go on with the 
work. Moreover, Peking forced upon the com- 
pany a large, unneeded foreign loan which would 
have been expended by government men without 
the stockholders knowing how much stuck to the 
fingers of the officials. So, instead of using the 
money for building the road, the company loaned 
it out in small amounts at a high interest and will 
repay it as soon as the terms of the loan permit. 

The case of Fokien shows how irresponsible gov- 
ernment paralyzes the spirit of enterprise. For 
half a century Fokienese have been wandering into 
the English and Dutch possessions in Southeast- 
ern Asia, where not a few of them prosper as 
merchants, planters, mine operators, contractors 
and industrialists. Some of them return with 
capital, technical knowledge, and experience in 
managing large undertakings. Yet, aside from a 
saw mill — the only one I saw in China — I hear of 
not one modern undertaking in the province. The 
coal seams lie untouched. The mandarins lay it 
to the difficulty of getting the coal to tidewater. 
The Fokienese rich from his tin-mining in 
Perak — there are thirty Chinese millionaires in 
the Malay States — tells you it is dread of official 
' ' squeeze. ' ' 

The country back of Swatow is rich in minerals. 



122 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

But what probably would happen to a retired 
Singapore contractor so rash as to embark on a 
mining venture there? The clan of Hakkas in 
the neighborhood of the ore deposit would demand' 
something for letting him work it unmolested. 
The local mandarin would have to be squared. 
The "li kin" officials would sweat him well before 
letting his imported machinery go up the river. 
The magistrate of every district his product 
touched in going down to the coast would hold him 
up. Finally, at any moment, his operations might 
be halted by an outbreak of superstitious fear lest 
they were disturbing the earth dragon and spoil- 
ing the luck of the community. Small wonder a 
high imperial official confessed to me — in confi- 
dence — that not one penny of his fortune ever 
goes into a concern not under foreign protection. 

His Excellency Wu Ting Pang is so impressed 
with the blight of insecurity that he suggests that, 
instead of clamoring for an early parliament, the 
people exact of the Imperial Government a Magna 
Charta guaranteeing the following rights: No 
arrest without a proper warrant; public trial 
within twenty-four hours; no punishment or fin- 
ing of the relatives of a convicted person ; no con- 
fiscation of the property of his partners or busi- 
ness associates. 

Although vast in aggregate the agriculture of 
China is petty agriculture and its industry is petty 
industry. Its business men are' unfamiliar with 
the management of large-scale enterprises and 



INDUSTRIAL FUTURE OF CHINA 125 

have had no experience with the joint-stock com- 
pany. Highly honorable as merchants and bank- 
ers, they have never worked out an ethics for the 
stock company, and in such relations they are the 
prey of a mutual distrust which is only too well 
founded. 

The taking of commissions has become so in- 
grained in the Chinese that it is no longer a moral 
fact but only an economic fact. Your cook takes 
his wages as a recompense for his technical serv^ 
ices only; for his services as a business man in 
buying for your household he feels himself en- 
titled to a profit. Bray him in a mortar but you 
will not get the notion out of him. A customs 
chief tells me how thirty years ago when he was a 
newcomer he complained bitterly to his Chinese 
teacher about the way he as a foreigner was 
robbed by his servants. "But," explained the 
scholar, "we Chinese suffer from the practice as 
much as you do. If I give the old woman who is 
my servant five cash to buy food for me she keeps 
one cash. If I give her one cash to buy vinegar 
she cannot pocket her commission, but she will not 
be foiled; she spills a little of the vinegar!" 

This is why as soon as a business capital is any- 
where got together it begins mysteriously to melt 
away. A company formed to build a certain rail- 
way maintains an idle office staff of ten, and 
station-masters have been engaged and put on the 
pay-roll, although not a rail has been laid. Much 
of the pay of these lucky employes goes, no 
doubt, to those who appointed them. Sleepers 



126 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

were bought in great quantities, and after lying 
for a year were sold to carpenters. One of the 
government railways called for tenders for sleep- 
ers. A German firm bid lowest and filled the 
order. Later, when more sleepers were wanted, 
the purchasing official, instead of calling for new 
bids, telegraphed to the firm, "Your Japanese 
competitor has come down to your figure, but you 
may have the contract for a moderate commis- 
sion." The offer was ignored, and the Japanese 
supplied the sleepers, no doubt after giving a 
douceur. 

In a big government works the foreign expert 
after due tests designated a certain coal as the 
best in heating capacity. The first lot supplied 
to him by the purchasing agent of the works was 
K. The second was poor, although the agent 
stoutly insisted it was the same coal. He had been 
given a commission to substitute the inferior fuel. 
The railway engineer, whether foreigner or Chi- 
nese, is continually put out by the arrival from 
oversea of machinery or materials different in 
kind or grade from what he had ordered. The 
cause is not inadvertence. There are thirteen 
railways now being constructed on the basis of 
"everything Chinese," and most of them have one 
trait in common; the money goes faster than the 
construction. The Amoy-Changchowfu line, the 
first in Fokien, proceeds with disappointing slow- 
ness. Great piles of rails and ties lie deteriorat- 
ing, waiting for road-bed. The construction of 
the Canton-Hankow line advances at what the 



INDUSTRIAL FUTUEE OF CHINA 127 

stockholders feel to be a snail's pace. The Anhwei 
Railway Company has disbursed five million taels 
and not a mile of track is completed. The piers 
for the bridges are ready, the structural iron for 
them is on the ground, and thirteen miles of grad- 
ing is completed. But the company's money and 
credit are gone, the shareholders are disgusted, 
and work is nearly at a standstill. There are 
enough of such experiences to make one call China 
' ' the land of broken promise. ' ' Some of the trou- 
ble is due to bad judgment, but too often the man- 
agement has been pulled out of plumb by the itch 
for commissions. 

"With us the individual early detaches himself 
from his family and circulates through society as 
a free self -moving unit. In China family and clan 
ties mean more, and there are few duties more 
sacred than that of helping your kinsmen even 
at other people 's expense. You feel it is right to 
provide berths for your relatives and no scruple 
as to their comparative fitness tweaks your con- 
science. When an expectant is appointed to office 
(not in his own province, of course), his relatives 
even unto the n th degree call upon him with con- 
gratulations and suggest that he find places for 
them in his new post. After he takes office the 
proteges of his predecessor, realizing that their 
room is more prized than their company, have the 
grace to get out as soon as they can "look 
around. ' ' 

Now, this pestilent nepotism quickly fastens it- 
self upon industrial undertakings. The manager 



128 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

of a government plant on looking into one of the 
departments, which was going badly, found that 
thirty-three out of the fifty-five men in that depart- 
ment were relatives of the foreman. Since two 
years ago, when the Peking-Hankow Railway 
came under Chinese management, the positions 
along the line have been filled on the basis of sheer 
favoritism, with the result of loading the pay-roll 
with incompetents. No wonder the ticket-seller 
regards the crowd at the ticket-window as a nui- 
sance, and lets them fume while he chats with his 
friends. And you may hear the track manager 
complain bitterly of having to put in and retain 
certain relatives of the director, who cannot do the 
work assigned them. 

So desperate is the struggle to live and so in- 
grained is the spirit of nepotism that whenever 
a capital is laid out by anyone else than the owner 
employes multiply like locusts. They drop out 
of the clouds and spring up from the ground. 
The government offices at Peking are clogged with 
useless place-holders. You marvel that colleges 
with twenty-five or thirty teachers maintain ten 
officers of administration until you realize that 
half of them are sinecurists. In one plant the 
foreign expert found thirty-six parasites sucking 
the water-pipe all day and drawing good pay. 
One was purchaser of coal, another purchaser of 
wood, another custodian of the steam-fittings, and 
so on. 

At Lin Ching a Belgian company came to terms 
with a Chinese company with a concession by giv- 



n 



■A a 



o\ 2 



o 





INDUSTRIAL FUTURE OF CHINA 131 

ing them half the stock and agreeing to pay a 
Chinese director and a Chinese engineer in addi- 
tion, of course, to the foreign director and the for- 
eign engineer. The theory is that the Belgians 
and the Chinese are partners in operating the col- 
liery; but the naked fact is, that the latter are 
mere parasites on the enterprise. The Chinese 
director lives at Tientsin on his seven hundred dol- 
lars a month, and never goes near the mine. The 
Chinese engineer with his two hundred and twenty- 
five dollars a month and a fine house built him 
near the mine gives no technical services whatever 
but goes about suppressing the petty native coal 
diggings that impair the exclusiveness of the com- 
pany's concession! 

In another place a German company has opened 
coal mines under an arrangement whereby the 
Chinese take half the nominal capital and a Chi- 
nese director is paid a fine salary. He lives at 
Tientsin and never comes near the works. The 
German manager directs and he earns his salary. 
If the coal is being pilfered and he makes com- 
plaint to the hsien magistrate against the culprits, 
they are persistently let off until the manager 
calls and fills the pockets of the worthy mandarin 
with dollars. Then the thieves are bambooed. 
Under such harassments the foreign staff as a 
whole can take no holiday. They must be on the 
spot all the time, for the moment they leave things 
go badly and in a short time the plant would be 
ruined. 

At the present stage the Chinese business man 



132 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

can get along neither with the foreign expert nor 
without him. Four hundred miles up the West 
Eiver you see tons of heavy machinery lying on 
the bank. It was imported for smelting silver ore 
in the mountains fifteen miles away. The Chinese 
found themselves unable to set up the smelter, so 
the machinery rusts while the ore is smelted in 
England. An engineer will be given lot after lot 
of bad coal because his manager never thinks of 
fuel in terms of heating capacity. To him coal is 
coal and the cheapest is the best. Shansi is the 
Pennsylvania of the Empire, and at great price 
the provincials regained the right to exploit its 
mineral wealth themselves. Yet a certificated 
colliery manager has been four years at Shansi 
University as professor of mining and never has 
his professional opinion been sought on a mining 
question ! 

The Hanyang Company appreciates the expert 
and employs twenty-two French and Belgians to 
supervise the making of steel. But not always 
are the Chinese so fortunate. The first Swatow 
Electric Light Company failed through reliance 
upon a foreigner who was less of an expert than 
he represented himself to be. About three years 
ago the " Protection of Shansi" Mining Company 
undertook to develop coal-mining in their prov- 
ince. The first expert they employed was to 
reconnoiter and report. He spent several months 
going about, but, as he failed to map his wander- 
ings and finds, his reports were worth little. 
Then a great English expert was engaged, but 



INDUSTRIAL FUTURE OF CHINA 133 

when, on reaching Tientsin, he learned he was ex- 
pected to spend months in the field instead of a 
few weeks, he took his expenses and went home. 
When, finally, a twenty-foot vein of coal was at- 
tacked, expert after expert quit because each in- 
sisted on having things done right, and the com- 
pany would not follow his advice. It is plain that 
both the native capitalists and the imported 
experts have grievances. The situation is un- 
fortunate, and cannot but retard development 
until China has good engineering and technical 
schools for training experts of her own. 

The inefficiency of the management of Chinese 
undertakings is heart-rending in its waste of 
sweat-won wealth. The superintendent of con- 
struction of a railroad will be a worthy mandarin, 
without technical knowledge or experience, who 
has to rely wholly on his subordinates. Or the 
prominent financier chosen president of the com- 
pany feels himself quite above the vulgar details 
of management and so delegates the task to some- 
one of less consequence. This gentleman, too, 
feels above the work, and passes it down to some- 
one else. So the big men become figureheads and 
little men run the enterprise. Any government 
undertaking suffers from the conceit and un- 
practically of the mandarins. The initial price 
of the cement from a government plant was fixed 
at a dollar a barrel more than the cost of good 
foreign cement. The officials thought that the 
people would beg for "imperial cement" regard- 
less of price. 



134 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

When the government match factory was pro- 
jected for Taiyuanfu the factory was built, ma- 
chinery was ordered from, the United States and 
workmen were hired. But the machinery never 
came for no money had accompanied the order, 
and the workmen were paid for doing nothing un- 
til in a couple of years the fund allotted to the 
enterprise was exhausted. Not long ago the en- 
terprise was revived and the government product 
has now crowded out the Japanese matches. 
Near Wuhu is a modern brick kiln which under 
a foreign superintendent turned out excellent 
bricks at the same price as those from the native 
kilns ; but under Chinese management the quality 
has sunk until the output is little better than the 
native bricks. 

Again, the Chinaman is handicapped by his lust 
for immediate profit without regard to the future. 
For example, near the end of 1909 Captain Plant 
began running the "Shutung" through the 
Yangtse Gorges to Chungking. It was the first 
steam service on that dangerous reach and the 
little steamer made money so fast that her Chinese 
owners, intent only on the gain of the moment, 
gave the Captain no time between trips to clean 
her engines. Only when the indispensable 
skipper refused to make another trip was he 
granted a week to overhaul her vitals. 

Years ago Dr. Nevius, a missionary at Chefoo, 
set out the best of American fruit trees and the 
product of his orchard became famous through- 
out the Far East. But on his death the orchard 



INDUSTRIAL FUTURE OF CHINA 137 

came into the hands of a Chinaman who, greedy 
of the maximum profit, made it a pasture for pigs, 
neglected to loosen the soil and never pruned the 
trees. As a result the fruit has greatly deterior- 
ated, the cherries have become small, the apples 
and pears knotty, woody and wormy. 

The fact is the faulty past lies too heavily on 
the mind and the character of contemporary 
Chinese. The real strength of the race will not 
generally declare itself till a new generation is 
on the stage, bred in the new education and en- 
forcing a higher code. Perhaps the moral atmos- 
phere will not clear till there has come a marked 
let-up in the struggle for existence. At the back 
of the business man's mind lurks, I fancy, a dim 
sense of a myriad clutching hands. People do not 
judge one another very strictly when each acts with 
the abyss ever before his eyes. The excellent 
reputation enjoyed by the Chinese business men 
in Malaysia suggests that only in a land of op- 
portunity does the natural solidity of character 
of the yellow race show itself. In the Straits Set- 
tlements the Chinese are successful producers of 
pith helmets, chemicals, medicines, lighthouse 
lenses, machine-carved furniture, ice-making ma- 
chines, wines, liqueurs and other articles not yet 
attempted by their brethren at home. 

It is not likely, then, that the march of indus- 
trialism in China will be so rapid and triumphant 
as many have anticipated. Jealousy of the 
foreigner, dearth of capital, ignorant labor, offi- 
cial squeeze, graft, nepotism, lack of experts, and 



138 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

inefficient management will long delay the harness- 
ing of the cheap labor power of China to the 
machine. Not we, nor our children, but our 
grandchildren, will need to lie awake nights. It 
is along in the latter half of this century that 
the yellow man's economic competition will begin 
to mold with giant hands the politics of the planet. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE GEAPPLE WITH THE OPIUM EVIL 

IT was in West China. Our sedan chairs were 
a mile behind us, and we were not sure of the 
road. ' ' How far is it to Paoki f ' ' the consul asked 
a peasant. No answer. ''How far is it to 
Paoki?" The man turned his head a little. The 
third asking brought a glimmer of speculation 
into the vacant eyes. On the fourth asking he 
caught the idea ' ' Paoki. ' ' The fifth punctured his 
mental fog with "How far?" and slowly and 
thickly as from a sleep-walker came the reply, 
"Forty li." "What does it mean?" I demanded 
after a dozen such experiences in a single morn- 
ing. " Is it sheer natural stupidity ? " " No, ' ' re- 
plied the consul, ruminating, "probably opium. 
You have heard the saying 'Out of ten Shensi 
people, eleven smokers!' " 

This was my first good look at China's Skele- 
ton in the Closet. 

Opium smoking was first heard of in China in 
the fourteenth century. In 1729 there was an 
edict issued which prohibited the use of opium 
and ordered the closing of the smoking-dens. 
Nobody knows whether or not it was enforced. 
Late in that century, in consequence of the British 
East India Company's pushing its Bengal opium 

139 



140 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

into the various ports of China, the habit took 
root in all parts of the country. The British 
found that it was a lucrative trade and never let 
up. The total gain from Indian opium — that is, 
the amount paid by China and Eastern Asia for 
that commodity above its cost price between 1773 
and 1906 — has been estimated at two billion, one 
hundred millions of dollars. About 1840, the 
Chinese Emperor became so alarmed at the in- 
roads of the poison that he appointed Lin Im- 
perial Commissioner at Canton with orders to put 
down the trade. His efforts brought him into 
collision with the English traders and his de- 
struction of ten thousand chests of opium pre- 
cipitated the First Opium War. It ended in Eng- 
land's forcing on China a humiliating treaty 
which heavily indemnified the traders for their 
losses. In 1857 came the Second Opium War re- 
sulting in the Treaty of Tientsin which bound the 
government of China not to interfere with nor 
limit the introduction of Indian opium into the 
Empire. 

Until this time the government had not tol- 
erated the cultivation of the poppy plant; but 
now, rather than see the country drained of silver 
to buy of India a narcotic that can easily be pro- 
duced on the soil of China, the government re- 
moved its restriction, and the poppy spread with 
great rapidity. In the end six-sevenths of the 
opium consumed by the Chinese was home-grown. 

Meanwhile the luxury use of opium spread 
with appalling rapidity. Four years ago the 



GRAPPLE WITH THE OPIUM EVIL 141 

Chinese were using seventy times as much, opium 
as they were using in 1800. Annually twenty-two 
thousand tons of the drug were absorbed, most 
of it converted into thick smoke and inhaled by 
a legion of smokers estimated to number at least 
twenty-five millions. Even the English allow there 
were eight million smokers. In the poppy provin- 
ces opium was so plentiful and cheap that a 
shocking proportion of the adult population be- 
came addicted to the habit. In Szechuan, in the 
cities half of the men and a fifth of the women 
came to smoke opium. In the country the pro- 
portions were fifteen per cent, and five per cent, 
respectively. In Kansuh three men out of four 
were said to be smokers. In western Shensi 
we came upon districts where we were assured 
that nine-tenths of the women above forty smoked. 
In Yunnan the principal inquiry in matrimonial 
negotiations was, "How many opium pipes in the 
family?" this being a certain indication of its 
financial standing. Whole populations had given 
themselves up to the seductive pipe and were sink- 
ing into a state of indescribable lethargy, misery 
and degradation. 

The pipe has a peculiar seduction for the 
Chinese because their lives are so bare of interest. 
They indulge in none of that innocent companion- 
ship of men and women which contributes such a 
charm to life. They take to their twin vices — 
opium smoking and gambling — as a relief from 
the dreary flatness that results from sacrificing 
most of the things that make life interesting in 



142 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

the mad endeavor to maintain the largest possible 
number of human beings on the minimum area. 
Under a family system that tempts them to multi- 
ply without regard to prospects the Chinese have 
pruned away much that lends value to life. Five 
years ago the Philippine Opium Commission ob- 
served in its report: 

"What people on earth are so poorly provided 
with food as the indigent Chinese, or so destitute 
of amusement as all Chinese both rich and poor? 
There are no outdoor games in China, or indeed 
any games except in a gambling sense. Absolute 
dullness and dreariness seem to prevail every- 
where. As these two demons drive the Cauca- 
sians to drink so they drive the Chinese to opium. 
As an individual may by habitual toil and atten- 
tion to business become incapable of amusement, 
so a race of almost incredible antiquity, which has 
toiled for millenniums, may likewise reach a point 
in its development where the faculty of being 
amused has atrophied and disappeared, so that all 
that remains is the desire to spend leisure in 
placidity. And nothing contributes so much to 
this as opium. In Formosa the merry Japanese 
boys are teaching the placid Chinese lads to play 
tennis, foot ball, polo, vaulting, etc., with the view 
— the Japanese teachers say — of improving them 
physically and also of developing in them a love 
of sports which will prevent them from wishing to 
spend their leisure indoors smoking opium. And 
the poor who have no leisure? They often have 
no food, or so little that any drug which removes 



GKAPPLE WITH THE OPIUM EVIL 143 

first the pangs of hunger, and later the healthy- 
cravings of appetite, seems a boon to them. Add 
to this the feeling of peace and well being that 
often accompanies the smoking of opium, and it 
is not difficult to see why the indigent Chinese use 
it. We administer morphine to relieve pain. The 
life of the indigent Chinese coolie is pain caused 
by privation. The opium sot is an object of pity 
rather than of contempt. If the Chinese seem 
more easily to contract such evil habits than other 
nations, and are more the slave of them, is not 
that due to the dullness of the lives of the well- 
to-do and to the painful squalor of the indigent ? ' ' 
A month's travel by sedan chair gave me some 
light on why the coolie hankers for his pipe. Our 
chair and baggage coolies took with them no wrap 
nor change of clothing and eight successive days 
of rain brought them to a state of utter misery. 
After twelve hours of splashing and slipping up 
and down the mountain roads and fording swollen 
torrents in a cold drizzle under a weight of from 
seventy to ninety pounds they would come at even- 
ing utterly exhausted to a cheerless, comfortless 
Chinese inn. No fire, no clothing save two soaked 
cotton garments; no bed save a brick hang with 
a ragged mat on it; no blankets. For supper 
nothing but rice and bean curd or macaroni. 
What wonder that, after eating, the poor fellow 
curled up on the mat with the tiny lamp beside 
him, rolled the black bead and sucked the thick 
smoke till he passed beyond the reach of cold, 
discomfort and weariness ! 



144 



THE CHANGING CHINESE 



One may wonder why the cancer was allowed to 
eat so deeply into the social body. To be sure, 
the hands of the government were tied by the 
treaty privileges of the trade in foreign opium. 
Still, what Western society would tolerate the 
ravages of alcohol as China has supinely tolerated 
the ravages of opium? Even if government 




FAMILY AND HOME VANISHING INTO THE OPIUM PIPE 

(Native reform cartoon) 

could do nothing, other agencies would have 
sprung into activity. The pulpit, the platform, 
the school, the chair, the press, and the temperance 
societies and movements would have set bounds 
to the gangrene. But Chinese society lacks most 
of these organs of self-protection. In the re- 
ligions of China there is no place for preaching 
or church discipline. The schools were expected 



GEAPPLE WITH THE OPIUM EVIL 145 

to teach nothing but the classic learning. News- 
papers did not circulate. Private associations, 
even innocent societies for moral purposes, were 
under the ban of government. Above all, women, 
the natural foes of destructive vice, were bound 
and dumb. One of the greatest forces behind the 
temperance movement in the West has been the 
influence of women, rallying, organizing, and 
agitating in defense of the home. But in China 
not one woman in a thousand can read. Women 
have no part in discussion, no place in public 
life and hence no means of voicing the woe that 
comes to them from the smoking of opium by 
their men folk. 

What finally moved the Imperial Government, 
at a heavy sacrifice of public revenue, to enter on 
its great struggle was not so much pity for the 
wreck and misery caused by the seductive narcotic 
as a realizing sense of the weakness of the Chinese 
nation in the presence of the Western Powers. 
The reign of apathy and selfishness among the 
Chinese, their lack of public spirit and effective 
cooperation at critical moments were inviting 
treatment ever more aggressive and ruthless. It 
became clear even to the haughty and hide-bound 
Manchu that, unless the people speedily renounced 
the vice that was undermining its manhood and 
recovered its normal resisting power, there was 
no hope for China among the nations. 

The famous Anti-Opium Edict issued by the 
Empress Dowager September 20, 1906, which 
commanded that the growth, sale, and consump- 



146 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

tion of opium should cease in the Empire within 
ten years was the opening gun in what is un- 
doubtedly the most extensive warfare on a vicious 
private habit that the world has ever known. The 
gigantic moral conflict has raged over a territory 
comparable in size to the United States. Hun- 
dreds of thousands of officials, gentry, students, 
merchants and den-keepers have been drawn into 
it. Blood has been shed and property has been 
destroyed on a great scale. The stake is the lives 
of some millions of opium-users, to say nothing 
of the oncoming generations. The guerdon of 
victory is the assured independence of the yellow 
race and its eventual participation on equal terms 
with the white race in the control of the destinies 
of the planet. 

Once see the poppy in her pride and you realize 
that there is nothing drab nor homespun about 
opium raising. Among plots of sordid beans or 
pulse or cabbages the poppy field stands out like 
a flame. At full bloom its splendor befits a crop 
that is to lure and ruin men rather than nourish 
them. The dominant note is snow white, but bells 
of all gorgeous hues are to be seen : purple, ruby, 
crimson, scarlet and pink, besides white blossoms 
tipped or streaked with these — a riot of color. 
For rich prodigal beauty no field crop under the 
sun can match it. The flowering poppy is vivid, 
dramatic and passionate, like some superb ad- 
venturess luring troops of lovers and, vampire- 
like, sucking out their souls with her kisses. 




South half of the west wall of Sianf u, from the west gate 




City wall and five-story pagoda, Canton 



GEAPPLE WITH THE OPIUM EVIL 149 

Nor is the harvesting commonplace. When the 
poppy's time has come all you see is thousands 
of spherical pods one or two inches through, erect 
each on its slender reed-like stem. A man with 
a small knife follows the rows cutting lightly 
around every pod. Drop by drop a juice exudes, 
milky at first but which in a day or two turns 
brown and gummy. Then the reaper goes about 
scraping from the pods this precious gum. Just 
a few pounds of drug to the acre — that is all 
there is to it. And the stalks dry and bleach like 
the cast-off skin of a rattlesnake until they are 
gathered for fuel, and the pods are threshed for 
the poppy seed to be ground for food or pressed 
for oil. 

Now, raw opium is a poison, and when the crop 
is in the unhappy women who have been waiting 
for it — for women abhor a violent death — seize 
their opportunity. When we were at Wukung 
in Shensi the mission ladies there were being 
called out nearly every day to give an emetic and 
save the life of some poor creature who thought 
to end her sorrows with the only poison within 
her reach. From the adjoining province a cor- 
respondent writes: ''One benefit of the continual 
rise in the price of opium is the manifestly de- 
creasing number of attempts at suicide by taking 
the drug. One now finds it hard to extract death 
from ten rolls of opium and the increased cost of 
poison is deterring many would-be suicides. The 
present make of opium-rolls, selling at ten cash, 
contain only about three parts of opium to seven 



150 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

of horse-hoofs and other leather waste." In 
other words, when suicide costs as much as ten 
cents it is a luxury that few can afford. In a 
province where a servant gets eighty cents a 
month and finds himself, this is not to be wondered 
at. 

In most parts of China the cultivation of the 
poppy has been spreading at an alarming rate 
within our own time. It is especially, however, 
the interior provinces, shut away by mountain 
ranges from the commercial highways, that have 
gone over to poppy growing. The reason is that 
opium is the one crop that can be got to market 
without most of its value being eaten up in the 
cost of transportation. A coolie will trot a picul 
[133 lbs.] of opium to market over several hun- 
dred miles of atrocious roads without seriously 
adding to the cost of the drug that sells for from 
two to ten dollars a pound. No mere food prod- 
uct of the same soil could profitably be carried 
a twentieth of the distance to find a market. To 
the farmers of Yunnan, Kweichow, Szechuan, 
Shensi, or Kansuh, opium is the only road to the 
market, just as in "Washington's time whiskey 
was the only route by which the trans- Allegheny 
settlers could get their surplus corn to tidewater. 
And poppy prohibition stung some of them into 
resistance just as the Federal taxes on spirits 
galled the farmers of Western Pennsylvania into 
the Whiskey Eebellion of 1798. 

When the Empress Dowager took opium by the 



GRAPPLE WITH THE OPIUM EVIL 151 

throat half the acreage of certain interior prov- 
inces was given over to the poppy during its sea- 
son. So much had the plant cut into the produc- 
tion of food that the cost of the necessities of 
life was crowding the local laboring people to the 
verge of starvation. There was more money in 
opium than in anything else, and so leases, land 
rentals and mortgages became adjusted to the 
lucrative opium crop. To many a farmer the re- 
linquishment of the poppy would spell blue ruin. 
The stopping of opium-growing looked about as 
simple and feasible a proposition as the stopping 
of corn-growing in the West or of cotton-plant- 
ing in the South by Act of Congress. Many 
thought the effete Imperial Government would 
never show the force and authority necessary to 
wipe out the chief money-making crop of the peas- 
antry. 

The ins and outs of the fight on the poppy are 
full of the Arabian Nights flavor. When the 
magistrate proclaims the Anti-Opium Edict and 
announces that he intends to see it obeyed the cul- 
tivators call upon him in a body, grovel on their 
faces before him, remind him that he is the 
"father and mother" of them all and beseech him 
to save them from ruin by letting them grow their 
poppy just this season. Of course there is a fat 
bribe lurking in the background for the official 
who is open to that sort of persuasion; and un- 
less the official is a reformer at heart or else 
afraid of losing his place, he is not wholly ob- 



152 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

durate. The salary of the mandarin is nominal 
and he has somehow to squeeze a living income 
out of his district. 

But if importunity avails not the farmers re- 
sort to ruse. They raise the poppy in small 
patches in out-of-the-way places off the main road 
— behind walls or trees or up a little side valley — 
or they cut off the leaves and flowers so the crop 
cannot be recognized at a distance. They rely 
on steering-off or bribing shut the eyes of the 
"runners" sent out from the magistrate's head- 
quarters to look for infractions of the Edict. If, 
nevertheless, the mandarin hears of illicit poppy- 
growing and comes in his big green sedan chair 
borne on the shoulders of four bearers, with a 
force of men to pull up the outlawed plants, the 
tactics suddenly change. He may be met by the 
men of several confederated villages armed with 
sickles, pitchforks, and billhooks and intent on 
mischief. At Wukung shortly before our visit 
the mob put to flight the satellites" of the magis- 
trate and even laid rude hands on the official him- 
self. He took refuge in a temple and sagely let 
it be known the farmers might grow poppy for 
all he cared. 

At Kin Kiangai in Kansuh, the prefect who 
had come to destroy the growing opium was set 
upon in the official inn and beaten nearly to death. 
In a few weeks, however, several of the leaders 
of the riot were beheaded after a public trial and 
the overawed farmers hastened to dig up their 
poppy fields. At Wenchow in Chekiang, when the 




CO 2 



O 



•a 

SB ni 



O m 



P< 



GBAPPLE WITH THE OPIUM EVIL 155 

magistrate appeared with a company of soldiers 
and proceeded to destroy the evil crop, about two 
thousand farmers attacked his force and a number 
of rioters and soldiers were injured. Three hun- 
dred troops and a gunboat were presently dis- 
patched to the scene and the law-breakers were 
quelled. 

Near the capital of Shansi a certain Kung who 
had fortified himself with drink went about beat- 
ing a gong and threatening to kill anyone who 
failed to sow his poppy. When later the magis- 
trate sent to arrest him he had disappeared. 
Later on, several women went to his yamen and 
demanded leave to grow opium. Things looked 
ugly and the magistrate appealed to the gover- 
nor of the province who sent him a mandarin with 
a detachment of three hundred soldiers. Several 
villages combined and met the force with bucolic 
weapons in hand. The mandarin became alarmed 
and ordered his soldiers to fire. After a volley 
of blank cartridge which only excited derision, 
the troops fired ball cartridge and fifty fell killed 
or mortally wounded. Both sides were aghast 
at the deadliness of the rifles, which the soldiers 
knew scarcely more about than the peasants. 
The Chinese soldier is allowed ten cartridges a 
year for practice, but after the various ' ' squeezes ' ' 
have been made he gets about three. 

The ordinary penalty for growing poppy has 
been a fine and in some cases forfeiture of the 
field. Though no one has been executed for grow- 
ing poppy, there have been cases in which the 



156 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

resisters to authority, after due trial and sentence, 
have been taken out and decapitated in their own 
fields and their blood has run down between the 
rows of the poppy they prized more than the 
public welfare. 

Since the driving force behind the fight on the 
poppy comes from above, radiates from the apex 
of the governmental hierarchy at Peking, the 
higher officials are, in general, more vigorous in 
enforcing the Edict than the lower. There are 
fewer of them; they can be watched, and if they 
prove lukewarm they can be fined, cashiered, or 
degraded. In many cases viceroys, governors and 
taotais have been dismissed for lack of zeal, and 
new trusty men have been put in their place for the 
express purpose of putting through the govern- 
mental policy. But the little local mandarins are 
too numerous to be generally shaken up or cash- 
iered. So many of them who have their couple of 
pipes a day on the sly and want to let things 
go on in the good old easy way shrink from the 
risk of enforcing the Edict. Indeed, some of the 
more enterprising use the threat of enforcing as 
a club wherewith to blackmail the opium growers 
and den-keepers. One hears of all sorts of tricks 
by the small magistrates. One, on learning that 
his taotai was cruising about the country looking 
for poppy, saw to it that not one plant was left 
within sight of the main road; but the taotai 
foxily took the back road, which was lined with 
poppy fields, and the tricky magistrate lost his 
button of rank. 



GRAPPLE WITH THE OPIUM EVIL 157 

It is easy for the magistrate when called upon 
to report to clap his telescope to his blind eye, 
like Nelson at Copenhagen, and declare, "I see 
no poppy in my district." So sometimes the 
viceroy or taotai sends out trusty commissioners 
— workers in the anti-opium societies that are 
standing shoulder to shoulder with the govern- 
ment in the fight — to go up and down looking for 
poppy. If any is discovered, it will be destroyed 
and the magistrate will be punished. 

The missionaries are sworn enemies of opium. 
Indeed, it was the great memorial signed by 1,333 
missionaries from seven countries which, pre- 
sented in August, 1906, drew forth in Septem- 
ber the famous Edict, some of it in the very 
language of the memorial. It was fitting and 
natural, then, that one of the roving commissioners 
in Fokien should call on the secretary of a mis- 
sionary organization and say, "I am very anxious 
to find and uproot every poppy field; but I can 
not go everywhere myself to locate these fields. 
The local police or 'runners' are very venal and 
they will find the fields, threaten owners with ex- 
posure, receive their bribes for keeping still and 
I shall fail in my work. Now, your missionaries 
are in every part of the district I am sent to in- 
spect. Please ask them for me to send to you a 
report of any opium fields in their neighborhood ; 
and then you give their reports to me, and I will 
see that the plants are torn up." Within a few 
hours a circular letter was on its way to a hun- 
dred men who could not be bought nor brow- 



158 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

beaten, and the astonished missionaries found 
themselves for once in their lives cogs in the Im- 
perial Administration of China. 

The completer a blockade, the greater is the 
temptation to blockade-running. In like manner, 
as poppy prohibition approaches success and the 
price of opium jumps to several times the old 
figure, the schemes to smuggle through a crop 
become more and more brilliant. Perhaps the 
most elaborate ruse on record was worked last 
year in Szechuan, the great interior province 
that only two years ago was so given over to 
poppy-growing that food stuffs had reached an 
almost prohibitive price. The energetic Viceroy 
stamped out the poppy in every county but one — 
Fouchou hsien, about four hundred miles from 
the Viceroy's capital. In this county, seventy 
miles across, four-fifths of the cultivated area 
was in poppy last year and, as the price of opium 
is from five to ten times what it was, the tricky 
farmers made their fortunes. 

The scheme was worked as follows : In Janu- 
ary the taotai at Chungking, hearing that poppy 
had been sown despite the prohibition, visited 
Fouchou with soldiers, deposed the local magis- 
trate, fined him seven thousand dollars and sent 
out the soldiers to cut down the poppy. But the 
farmers covered with earth the sprouts just com- 
ing up and where the soldiers did see poppy grow- 
ing they cut off the tops, but took care to cut 
high enough not to kill the plant. No doubt there 
were inducements. When after a week the taotai 



GRAPPLE WITH THE OPIUM EVIL 159 

and his minions had departed with a fine sense 
of duty performed, the farmers hastened to un- 
cover the poppy sprouts. Then they planted peas, 
beans, or wheat between the rows so that the 
growth of these crops should later hide the poppy 
bloom from any distant view. Of course there 
was the new mandarin to be reckoned with. But 
he, either scenting a squeeze for himself or acting 
under secret orders, put out a very orthodox 
proclamation that poppy was prohibited and then 
announced that he would make personal inspection 
in June. If he found any poppy then he would 
confiscate the land and have the owners beaten. 
Dear man, he knew quite well that by June all 
the poppy crops would be harvested and out of 
sight ! 

Such wiles can be worked once and no more. 
The solid fact remains that in opium-steeped 
Szechuan which was producing a third of the 
drug produced in China the acreage has been cut 
down by eighty per cent. No more incontestable 
evidence of suppression can be offered than the 
great upward leap in the price of opium. In 
Honan we found it had doubled in a year and 
was worth more than its weight in silver. At 
Taiku in Shansi where no poppy grew last year 
it was selling for two and a half times its weight 
in silver and the pipe fiends of the rich old bank- 
ing families, anticipating a long siege, had laid 
in a stock to supply their needs for three years. 
At Hwachow in the same province it was six 
times as dear as the year before. At Sianfu in 



160 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

Shensi it sold at fifty cents an ounce, three or 
four times the price of the previous year. At 
Tehyang in Szechuan where not a spear of poppy 
grows the price was 1,600 cash an ounce as against 
120 cash two years ago. 

It is a striking fact that in four of the great 
poppy provinces prohibition has been followed 
by a season of wonderful harvests which have 
gone far to compensate the farmers, for their 
sacrifice and so reconcile them to the reform policy. 
The_ missionaries see the hand of God in this 
record wheat crop running from twenty-eight to 
forty bushels to the acre. This and the restora- 
tion of so much land to food-growing has made 
food more plentiful and cheap than it has been 
for years. New trade is springing up and the 
Hupeh merchants who were wont to drift every 
summer through far Kansuh buying the opium 
crop are now bringing back with them, instead of 
the enervating drug, goat skins, eagles ' wings, pig 
bristles, donkey hides, and human hair. In this 
province the Chinese experts in the agricultural 
school are by their experiments showing the 
farmers that they can grow beet root, potatoes and 
cotton instead of opium. In Fokien farmers are 
obtaining from our Department of Agriculture 
cotton seed for experimental planting in fields 
once given over to poppy growing. 

As earnest of its resolve to shake off its lethargy 
and make itself fit to speak with the enemy in the 
gate the Imperial Government proceeded to purge 
its ranks of opium-smokers. It was felt the 



GBAPPLE WITH THE OPIUM EVIL 161 

mandarins must set an example to the common 
people. In the words of the Edict, "If the offi- 
cials are fond of the vice, how can they guide 
the honest folk under them?" So, while officials 
over sixty years of age were tolerated in case they 
found themselves unable to throw off the smoking 
habit, all others were given a stated term within 
which to break off. If at the end of the term 
they were not cured, they were obliged to resign. 
Certain results of these regulations were start- 
ling. Not only were hundreds dismissed but 
several high officials — among them two governors 
and two vice-presidents of Imperial Boards — 
died in their persevering efforts to conquer the 
habit. These distressing cases caused the regula- 
tions to be relaxed so as to allow smokers past 
fifty to continue in office. 

Nothing turns a man into a liar like the black 
smoke, and it soon appeared that many an official 
who could not or would not quit the pipe was 
concealing his indulgence in order to keep his of- 
fice and its emoluments. Suspicions and denun- 
ciations became the order of the day. It was 
found necessary to clear the situation by establish- 
ing testing bureaus at Peking and certain pro- 
vincial capitals. The suspect was obliged to sub- 
mit himself to a rigid test. After being searched 
for concealed opium he was locked up for three 
days in a comfortable apartment and supplied 
with good food but no opium. If he held out 
he was given a clean bill of health, for no opium 
smoker can endure three days' separation from 



162 



THE CHANGING CHINESE 



his pipe. The strongest resolution breaks down 
under the intolerable craving that recurs each 
day at the hour sacred to the pipe. Eegardless 
of ruin to his career the secret smoker, be he even 
a viceroy or a minister, will on bended knees with 
tears streaming down his cheeks beg the at- 
tendant to relieve his agonies by supplying him 




captives of the lamp and pipe {Native reform cartoon) 



with the materials for a soothing smoke. Cer- 
tain highnesses, Princes of the Blood even, were 
by this means literally "smoked out" and sum- 
marily cashiered. In the army prohibition has 
teeth in it, for both officers and common soldiers 
have been beheaded for obdurate indulgence in 
the pipe. 

Foochow, long a seat of missionary influence, 
has made the most spectacular fight on opium. 



GBAPPLE WITH THE OPIUM EVIL 163 

When I was there no one under penalty of 
confiscation of his goods might smoke opium 
without registering and taking out a permit. 
Such a permit is issued only to one who can prove 
that he has the opium-smoking habit. The num- 
ber of his permit is posted outside the house 
where he may smoke and he must not smoke any- 
where else. While he is smoking no one may 
visit him on any pretext, and after he is through 
all his paraphernalia — pipe, bowl, lamp, opium 
box, needle, etc., — must be gathered up and put 
away. The aim is to lessen illicit smoking and 
to discourage the indulgence by making it soli- 
tary. 

Opium may be sold only by licensed dealers 
who account for and pay a tax on every ounce 
they sell, and it may not be sold in the place where 
it is smoked. No one may cook his opium him- 
self; he must buy it prepared. The amount the 
registered smoker may buy daily is stated in his 
permit. The salesman stamps in a blank space 
on his permit the amount of each purchase and it 
must never exceed the amount specified. The 
smoker must renew his permit every three months 
and each time it must be filled out for a less 
amount. After buying his opium he must carry 
it through the street openly. He may not carry 
it in his pocket, nor wrapped up, nor in his closed 
hand, nor in a closed box. No one may make or 
expose for sale the implements for opium smok- 
ing. The existing supply must suffice and as this 
is being reduced from time to time by solemn pub- 



164 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

lie burnings of stacks of paraphernalia, the basis 
for the vice is continually being cut away. 

Under the leadership of Lin, grandson of the 
famous Imperial Commissioner who destroyed 
the Indian opium, numerous anti-opium societies 
sprang into existence and cooperated with the 
officials. Their agents are given full authority to 
force an entry to any place. Every night their 
vigilance committees accompanied by policemen 
to enforce their demands for admittance patrol 
the -streets on the lookout for illicit selling or 
smoking. At times they have been attacked and 
some of them severely beaten but nothing turns 
them aside. The societies collect and break up 
paraphernalia seized in their raids or given up by 
reformed smokers. Prom time to time the stock 
on hand is stacked up in a ' public place and 
solemnly burned to signalize the progress of the 
campaign. Eleven burnings have taken place and 
the pipes, bowls, plates, lamps, and opium boxes 
sacrificed by fire are upwards of twenty -five thou- 
sand. Nothing is spared and no curio seeker need 
hope to rescue some rare and beautiful pipe by a 
tempting bid. 

Thanks to these various endeavors the amount 
of opium sold in Foochow has fallen off four- 
fifths and the number of opium-smoking permits 
out now is less than half the number originally 
issued. Hardly any but low-class people smoke. 
Since no new registrations are permitted, opium 
wins no recruits and its finish is in sight. 

Perhaps no city matches Foochow in the clever- 



GRAPPLE WITH THE OPIUM EVIL 165 

ness of its campaign. In many places the effort 
was made to close the shops and dens at a single 
sweep. But always, after the rejoicings and 
felicitations had died away, the dens quietly re- 
opened without the usual signboard and smoking 
went on as before. Spasms of prohibition have 




DEATH IN THE LAMP OF THE OPIUM SMOKER 

(Native reform cartoon) 

failed and only the process of pinching off the 
evil by a gradually tightening ligature of permits 
and licenses has succeeded. 

The story of the fight on the dens is full of in- 
cidents and alarms. In Anhwei one official went 
out at night dressed as a coolie and found eight 
dens filled with people. He had them all bam- 
booed on the spot, giving the proprietor 300 blows 
and the smokers 200. The next day not a shop 



166 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

was open. In Amoy the sub-prefect led raids on 
places where opium smoking was going on, private 
residences as well as shops. The smokers caught 
were beaten and their appliances destroyed. In a 
city in Hunan ten dens were secretly reopened. 
The magistrate had the places raided at night, the 
shops were confiscated and sold and the proprie- 
tors were imprisoned, beaten and cangued. The 
proceeds from the sale of the property went to 
support schools and police. 

Two years ago the founder of the Anti-Opium 
League reported: "In one city the doors of 
seven thousand dens have been shut. In other 
cities from two to three thousand have been closed 
while in still other cities a thousand such places 
have been done away with. In a hundred thou- 
sand market towns throughout the land the dens 
and divans have been closed. Altogether between 
one and two million places for the smoking of 
opium have been removed." 

Thanks to the posted proclamations and the ex- 
hortations of officials to headmen and gentry, to 
the warnings of missionaries, to the soap-box 
oratory of reformers, to the teachings in the gov- 
ernment colleges and to the preachments of the 
rising native press, in many centers a public 
opinion has been formed which holds up the hands 
of the government. It is coming to be "bad 
form" to smoke opium. It is no longer fashion- 
able to pass around pipes at dinner parties and 
and young men do not have to acquire the taste 
as one of the polite accomplishments. A national 



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GRAPPLE WITH THE OPIUM EVIL 169 

conscience is beginning to show itself and the 
slave of the pipe is put to the blush. It is now 
worth while to make the smoker carry his pur- 
chased opium in his open hand and wear his per- 
mit on a big wooden tablet that he cannot conceal. 
No one has a greater horror of "losing face" than 
the Chinese, and there is hope that the rising gen- 
eration will shrink from opium as they shrink 
from a cobra. 

Think of it! In thousands upon thousands of 
communities over this huge empire a battle has 
been going on. On the one side poppy-growers, 
den-keepers, dealers and some of the smokers ; on 
the other, the thoughtful few — reformers and pa- 
triots who realize China is doomed to be the 
world's serf if the drug is to go on sapping the 
strength of the people. Greed versus patriotism 
— it is just our line-up on liquor, conservation 
and child labor over again. And the people are 
coming out of their stupor and their selfishness. 
They are becoming unified through a common 
cause. A public has come into being — a public 
that cares about moral questions. Public opin- 
ion, which was biting its coral three hundred years 
ago in the coffee-houses of Shakespeare's London, 
is taking its baby steps in China. Millions for 
the first time in their lives have thought, "What 
is the public good?" And mandarins, dismount- 
ing from their immemorial high horse, have 
called together the gentry, the merchants and the 
headmen of the villages and preached to them of 
righteousness, judgment and the wrath to come. 



170 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

When Peking allowed ten years for the cleans- 
ing of the land from the opinm habit, it little 
dreamed of the enthusiastic response its initiative 
would call forth or of the rising spirit of patriot- 
ism that would come to its aid. The accomplish- 
ment of the five years elapsed has surpassed all 
anticipations. The production of opium in China 
has certainly been cut down sixty or seventy per 
cent., and the reform leaders even insist on eighty 
per cent. Millions of smokers are breaking off 
because the price of the drug has risen clear out 
of their reach. 

But every stride towards the suppression of 
poppy-growing leaves the imported Indian opium 
a larger factor in the situation. In 1907, when 
the exports of Indian opium to China aggregated 
51,000 chests or three thousand four hundred tons, 
the British Government agreed to reduce this 
total export at the rate of one-tenth, or fifty-one 
hundred chests, a year until 1911, with the assur- 
ance that the reduction would be continued in the 
same proportion beyond that period provided the 
Chinese Government had within the period cut 
down its home production in like degree. 

In May, 1906, the House of Commons unani- 
mously resolved that the Indo-Chinese opium 
trade "is morally indefensible" and requested 
the Government "to take such steps as may be 
necessary for bringing it to a speedy close." 
Nevertheless, when, in May, 1910, the Government 
was asked whether, seeing that the production of 
opium in China is being largely restricted, the 



GKAPPLE WITH THE OPIUM EVIL 171 

British Government felt inclined to respond to 
the desire of the Chinese Government to shorten 
the period of nearly eight years during which In- 
dia is to continue to send opium to China, the 
Under-Secretary of State for India answered in 
substance that his Majesty's Government was not 
disposed to disturb the settlement arrived at. 
The Christian people of Great Britain replied by 
making the twenty-fourth of last October, the fif- 
tieth anniversary of the ratification of the shame- 
ful treaty of Tientsin, a day of humiliation 
throughout the British Empire, and of prayer that 
the opium trade might speedily cease. This dra- 
matic stroke sent a new reform wave through 
China and led to the forming of a National Anti- 
Opium Society with headquarters at Peking. 

The Chinese Senate in a series of most earnest 
resolutions appealed to the British Government 
to release China from her treaty obligations to re- 
ceive Indian opium. It was pointed out that the 
great crusade was nearing its crisis. The peas- 
ants were becoming very restive when they saw 
their little patches of opium destroyed while the 
foreign merchant vessels laden with tons of the 
poison are permitted freely to enter Chinese 
ports. 

This spring England yielded to the accumula- 
ting pressure and entered into an agreement with 
China whereby she consents to the imposition of 
a higher duty on opium, agrees not to convey 
opium to any province of China which has sup- 
pressed the cultivation and import of native 



172 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

opium, engages to cut down the exports of opium 
from India until the complete extinction of the 
trade in 1917, provided China keeps step with her 
in the suppression of opium growing, and even 
promises to give the Indian opium trade its coup 
de grace before 1917 in case proof is received that 
the production of opium in China has ceased, 
Thus we are about to see ' ' Finis ' ' written on one 
of the blackest pages in the history of the rela- 
tions between East and West. 

The experience of the Chinese with opium 
shatters the comfortable doctrine that organized 
society need not concern itself with bad private 
habits. The hand of government was withheld 
for a long time in China, and if any salutary 
principle of self-limitation lurked in the opium 
vice it ought to have declared itself long ago. If 
it were in the nature of opium-smoking to confine 
its ravages to fools and weaklings, if out of each 
generation it killed off the two or three per cent, 
of least foresight or feeblest self-control, it might 
be looked upon as the winnower of chaff; and 
society might safely concede a man the right to go 
to the devil in his own way and at his own pace. 
But the vice is not so discriminating. Like a 
gangrene it ate deeper and deeper into the social 
body spreading from weak tissue to sound till the 
very future of the Chinese race was at stake. 
Now, liquor is to us what opium is to the yellow 
man. If our public opinion and laws had been 
so long inert with respect to alcohol as China has 
been with respect to opium, we might have suf- 



GRAPPLE WITH THE OPIUM EVIL 173 

fered quite as severely as have the Chinese. The 
lesson from the Orient is that when society real- 
izes a destructive private habit is eating into its 
vitals, the question to consider is not whether to 
attack that habit, but howl 



CHAPTER VII 

UNBINDING THE WOMEN OF CHINA 

A FEW years ago there was a great rising 
in Kansuh, the northwest province. The 
Mohammedan rebels closed in on the capital, Lan- 
chow, slaughtering whom they met. The terrified 
countrymen fled for life to its protecting walls, 
but the women, on account of their poor bound 
feet, fell behind and, failing to arrive before the 
gates shut, were butchered at the very threshold. 
While the shrieking women beat despairingly upon 
the iron-bound doors as they saw their blood- 
thirsty pursuers drawing near, hundreds of an- 
guished husbands who had outrun their crippled 
wives knelt before the English missionary and 
begged him to urge the Governor to open the gates 
and let the late-comers in. The missionary ex- 
plained how this would let the cutthroats in too, 
and added, "You would have your wives small- 
footed, wouldn't you? Well, this is your punish- 
ment. ' ' 

That prince of diplomats, Minister Wu, used 
to stir his American audiences with the remark, 
"Yes, we bind our women's feet; but you bind 
your women's waists. Which is the worse?" 
And we would look guiltily at one another and say, 
"Now, there is something in that." The fact is, 

174 



UNBINDING THE WOMEN OF CHINA 175 

that with us tight lacing affects only the one in 
ten who would be fashionable ; while in China foot- 
binding bore on nine out of ten. And tight lacing 
is self-imposed ; while foot-binding is a mutilation 
forced on helpless children. 

The Hakka women of southern Kuangtung do 
not bind their feet. In Canton, only the daughters 
of the well-to-do follow the custom and it was five 
days ere I saw a bound foot. You can go thence 
up the West Eiver five hundred miles and never see 
a woman hobble. In the extreme North of China 
again, the Manchu women leave the foot natural 
and this, perhaps, is why they are so big, healthy 
and comely. In the rest of the Empire, foot- 
binding has been not the folly of the idle, nor the 
fad of the fashionable, but a custom that bore upon 
all classes, poor and rich alike. At Kalgan on 
the Mongolian frontier the field women work kneel- 
ing, with great pads over the knees to protect them 
from the damp soil. In three districts in Kansuh, 
women are still crawling about their houses upon 
their knees, reduced to the locomotion of brutes to 
please the perverted taste of men ! In Shansi and 
Shensi, I saw the women wielding the sickle, not 
stooping — that would hurt their poor feet too 
much — but sitting, and hitching themselves along 
as they reaped. The women had to be carried to 
the wheat field on wheelbarrow or cart, and their 
helplessness is such that most of them never in 
their lives get a mile away from the house to 
which they were taken as brides. 

In the course of the morning we would meet 



176 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

perhaps a thousand men, but not three women. 
They cannot get from town to town unless car- 
ried. They hobble about their village a little, 
steadying themselves by a hand on the house-walls, 
or leaning on a staff. They move stiff -kneed like 
one on stilts. In our walk there is a point in the 
stride when the weight of the body comes upon 
the ball of the foot and the toes, and at this mo- 
ment the other leg is bent and swings forward. 
But in their case, the front part of the foot being 
useless, the other foot is brought forward sooner, 
and hence little knee action is necessary. This 
is why the woman seems tottering on pegs. This, 
too, is why the muscles of the' calf never develop, 
from the knee down the legs are broomsticks, and 
there are folds of superfluous skin. 

They tell us these tiny deformed feet appeal to 
the aesthetic in man. I doubt it. Take the poor 
mountaineer of western Shensi. Are we to sup- 
pose that this frowy dweller in a cave in the loess, 
this sloven denizen of a thatched hut with dirt 
floor, smoke-blackened and cobweb-festooned 
walls, a tattered paper window, a mud kang under 
a verminous mat and a couple of stools, where 
the pig and the dog dispute with the fowls the 
crumbs brushed from the master's grimy table — 
are we to suppose that this unlettered hind is so 
sensitive to beauty that at the cost of fighting the 
battle for existence with a crippled partner at his 
side, he insists on having a wife who, below the 
coarse garment of an Indian squaw, exhibits the 
' 'golden lily" of a four-inch foot! 



UNBINDING THE WOMEN OF CHINA 177 

Is it any wonder that, crippled, crushed by con- 
ventional restrictions and regarded with contempt, 
such a woman shows none of the home-making in- 
stinct that in America brightens even the log hut 
of the mountain backwoodsman with crazy quilts, 
rag carpets, tidies and old newspapers scissored 
into ornamental patterns and pasted around the 
clock shelf or over the windows? One notes no 
effort to adorn, no bit of white or color, no sign 
of "woman's hand." There is not even a fam- 
ily meal, but each fills his bowl from the rice 
bucket and lounges about eating when he pleases. 
Man has confined the woman so closely to the 
home that she knows not how to make a "home." 

The Chinese have a saying, "For each pair of 
bound feet there has been shed a tubful of tears." 
Very likely, since the bandaging begins between 
the fifth and the seventh years, and, after three 
years of misery, the front part of the foot and 
the heel ought to be so forced together that a dol- 
lar will stick in the cleft. Says Mrs. Little, who 
fifteen years ago founded the T'ien Tau Hui 
(Natural Foot Society) : "During these three 
years the girlhood of China presents a most mel- 
ancholy spectacle. Instead of a hop, skip, and a 
jump, with rosy cheeks like the little girls of Eng- 
land, the poor little things are leaning heavily on 
a stick somewhat taller than themselves, or car- 
ried on a man's back, or sitting, sadly crying. 
They have great black lines under their eyes, and 
a special curious paleness that I have never seen 
except in connection with foot-binding. Their 






178 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

mothers mostly sleep with a big stick by the bed- 
side, with which to get up and beat the little girl 
should she disturb the household by her wails; 
but not uncommonly she is put to sleep in an out- 
house. The only relief she gets is either from 
opium or from hanging her feet over the edge of 
her wooden bedstead so as to stop the circulation. 

They say one girl in ten dies from the process ; 
but, worse yet, a descendant of Confucius tells 
me that in Shansi girl babies are sometimes killed 
• at birth precisely because foot-binding so harrows 
up the feelings of the parents ! No wonder that 
on account of exaggerated foot-binding the women 
there are "extra dirty and extra lazy." They 
pass their lives on the hang, take no exercise and 
never get fresh air or a change of scene save on a 
rare festival day when the well-to-do are driven 
out in a springless Peking cart. 

One motive only induces a mother to impose 
such suffering on her little daughter — the fear of 
her not winning a husband. Until lately only 
prostitutes and slaves had natural feet, and a 
girl with such feet stood no better chance of mar- 
riage than a hunchback. A bridegroom finding 
that his bride had normal feet when he expected 
"golden lilies" would be justified by public opin- 
ion in returning the girl to her parents. But not 
even the bridegrooms are chiefly to blame. If 
Jack chose his Jill there would be some chance for 
the natural-foot girl. Many things enter into sex 
charm and young men would never have become 
so conventionalized but that a cherry lip, a roguish 



UNBINDING THE WOMEN OF CHINA 179 

eye, or a quick wit might have offset the handicap 
of a natural foot. But Chinese matches are made 
entirely by parents, so, in the final analysis, this 
terrible cross — the heaviest that has ever been 
laid on woman in a state of civilization — has been 
laid on the girlhood of China by the denatured 
taste of middle-aged fathers, each bound that his 
son shall have as modish a wife as the next one ! 

Thanks to foreign influence, thoughtful men be- 
came aroused to the evils of the custom and a few 
years ago an edict of the Empress Dowager 
commanded the people to abandon it. The mis- 
sionaries, who used to be tender of native cus- 
toms, have stiffened their attitude. They preach 
against it, denounce it in their Bible classes, and 
some even refuse membership to the woman who 
presents herself at the altar with bound feet. 
Nowadays the woman independent enough to turn 
Christian generally has the courage to unbind. 
In most mission schools no bound-foot girl is ad- 
mitted. Others admit them, but the feeling runs 
so high among the pupils that soon every girl who 
is not hindered by a conservative relative unbinds. 
One such school invited the officials and gentry 
to its closing exercises, consisting of marching, 
calisthenics and choruses by the pupils. Two of 
the little girls had bound feet. The contrast be- 
tween their pathetic helplessness and the lithe 
grace of the pretty rosy-cheeked girls who wheeled, 
turned, and tripped their way through the mazes 
was so impressive that on the spot the mandarin 
declared, "Foot-binding must go." Within five 



180 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

days the gentry — so as not to be beholden to the 
missionaries — opened a girl's school of their own. 
Last year the government ordered that no 
foot-bound girl be received into any of its schools. 
The npper classes seethe with rebellion against 
the senseless custom. Progressive ladies throw 
away bandages, massage their feet with oil, and 
vie with one another in recovering the natural 
foot. Think of a group of Chinese women 
eagerly comparing feet to see whose are larg- 
est! In China innovators must face insult and 
abuse. A girl with natural feet venturing on 
the streets of Wanhsien on the upper Yangtse 
had her clothes nearly torn from her back. 
Even the wives of mandarins make ready stock- 
ings and shoes but put off unbinding until they 
can find other ladies who will join them. So, for 
mutual support, the society people in a town fre- 
quently unite in a "Natural Foot Society" and 
pledge themselves to unbind and not to bind their 
daughters' feet. To brighten the matrimonial 
prospects of such girls, fathers sometimes pledge 
one another not to betroth their sons to girls with 
squeezed feet. These local societies enlist influ- 
ential persons, import neat patterns of Western 
ladies' shoes, hold meetings, circulate tracts, and 
encourage officials to make a public stand. The 
T'ien Tau Hui, which is now run by the Chinese, 
circulates upwards of thirty pieces of literature, 
edicts, proclamations, placards, poems, folders; 
some in local dialect, some in Mandarin, some in 
"Wenli, the language of scholars; written by offi- 



UNBINDING THE WOMEN OF CHINA 181 

cials, by missionaries, by physicians and by na- 
tive reformers. Eoentgen-ray illustrations of the 
bound foot and the natural foot, portrayal of the 
sufferings from bandaging, description of the in- 
jury to the general health, arguments showing 
the loss in woman's practical usefulness, com- 
parison of foot-binding to the mutilations of sav- 
age tribes — all manner of appeals are made. As 
ulceration, gangrene and death are tragic inci- 
dents of the practice, the "anti" movement de- 
velops warmth and emotion. There are poems on 
the " sorrows of foot-binding" which move peo- 
ple to tears, and one of these has been set to music 
and is sung with great effect. 

Speaking broadly, the reform has not reached 
farther than the cities and the higher classes. 
Much of the open country is not yet aware there 
is such a movement. The poor fear ridicule and, 
besides, they hope to get a better bride-price for 
their girls. "Where child-betrothal prevails the 
parents of a girl feel they have no right to dis- 
appoint the expectations of the boy's family. 
Thus people are tied together and each hesitates 
to follow his common sense. One Fokien village 
petitioned the Viceroy to command them to unbind 
their daughters' feet. All disapproved of the 
cruel custom but no one had the courage to lead 
the way. 

Chinese from the big coast ports, where West- 
ern influence is ascendant, will tell you in good 
faith that foot-binding has nearly died out. The 
fact is the release of the overwhelming majority 



182 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

of its victims is yet to come. Doctor Morrison, 
China correspondent of the London Times and a 
recognized authority, after traversing the central 
provinces of the Empire not long ago recorded it 
as his deliberate opinion that 95 per cent, of the 
females of the Empire above the age of eight are 
still mutilated. I think his estimate too high, but 
I feel sure that three-fourths of them are still so 
bound. It is safe to say that at the present mo- 
ment there are in China seventy million pairs of 
deformed, aching, and unsightly feet — the sac- 
rifice exacted of its womanhood by a depraved 
masculine taste. The wiser anticipate that it will 
be more than a generation ere the custom dies out. 
Japan is in the forty-third year of its Era of En- 
lightenment ; yet outside the cities you meet great 
numbers of women who at marriage followed the 
old custom of staining their teeth black in token 
they have forever renounced the thought of at- 
tracting the other sex. 

But cotton bandages are not the only bonds on 
the women of China. 

On a sultry July morning after passing the 
sedan chairs of an official and his wife I meet a 
coolie carrying two little cloth-covered boxes bal- 
anced on the bamboo across his shoulder. In 
each is a child of five or six. The boy's box has 
a tiny open window that allows him to get air and 
see what is passing; but the window of the other 
box is screened. His little sister has to endure 
the heat and the dark because she is a female and 
propriety commands it. Shut away from light 



UNBINDING THE WOMEN OF CHINA 183 

and knowledge — how symbolic of the lot of the sex 
in China! 

If in passing a Shensi shop one looks for a mo- 
ment at a woman who is not a grandmother, she 
turns hastily and slips back into the gloom of the 
women's apartment. To endure the glance of a 
man is immodest. Towards the close of a stifling 
day the village women come out of their houses 
and sit on a mat in front sewing and enjoying the 
coolness. If one of them sees a foreigner coming 
she scurries into the house as a frighted quail 
ducks and dodges into the stubble. Even girls of 
nine shrink away into the interior of the house if 
your eye lights on them. "When the harvest is in 
full swing every hand is needed and by dawn 
mothers and grandmothers, tads and tots, pile into 
a cart and are off with the men folks to the field. 
But never a female of from ten to twenty-five is to 
be seen, and one might suppose they had all been 
carried off by a plague. 

On the occasion of a special church service for 
old people, the hospitable wife of a college presi- 
dent in Poochow innocently plans to serve the vis- 
itors tea at her house, the men in one room, the 
women in another. But it appears that the gath- 
ering of these aged people under one roof, al- 
though in different rooms, clashes with Chinese 
notions of propriety. So far have they carried 
the estrangement of the sexes. 

A Hakka tells me that among his people the 
etiquette in the country districts forbids husband 
and wife to be seen talking together. Thus a 



184 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

young man and his wife meet in an empty lane 
and, supposing themselves unobserved, he asks 
her for the key of the garden gate. She throws 
it on the ground without looking at him and, once 
indoors, rates him roundly for speaking to her in 
public. ' ' Suppose, ' ' she says, l ' someone had seen 
us!" 

A woman never thinks of shaking hands with 
a man. If a gentleman wishes to give a lady a 
fan, he does not hand it to her lest their hands 
touchy but places it beside her. This sort of thing 
was made so much of that about the time of Aris- 
totle a local prude asked Mencius, "If one's sister- 
in-law is drowning, ought she to be drawn out 
with the hand?" To which the sage sensibly re- 
plied, "It is wolfish not to draw out a drowning 
sister-in-law. ' ' 

Brothers and sisters are separated at eight or 
ten years of age and thenceforth associate only 
under formal conditions. In Chinese literature 
nothing is suggestive save the love-songs — this 
because the canons of propriety never gave lati- 
tude for courting and love making, so they were 
scandalous from the first. One never sees a du- 
bious photograph of a Chinese woman, even of a 
Magdalen. Our illustrated corset and underwear 
advertisements shock the Chinese, and no lady 
missionary shows them the photograph of a sister 
or friend taken in decollete. What notions of our 
modesty they gather from our undraped statuary, 
paintings of the nude, theatrical posters, and bal- 
lets, may be imagined. 




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UNBINDING THE WOMEN OF CHINA 187 

Such restrictions might be looked upon as the 
safeguards by which the women of China are kept 
as modest and chaste as any women in the world. 
But, balancing their burdens against those of the 
men, it is clear that the laws governing woman's 
life are not for the sake of society or the race so 
much as for the male sex. In its every chapter 
Chinese culture is man-made and betrays the naive 
male view-point. Even the ideographs imbed im- 
perishably men's contempt for women; thus, re- 
peat the character for "woman" and you get "to 
wrangle." Three women together symbolizes 
" intrigue. " "Woman" under "roof" means 
"quiet," — man's quiet, mark you, not woman's. 
In Chinese thought the world is divided between 
good and evil, Yang and Yin. Darkness is ' ' Yin, ' ' 
cold is "Yin," earth spirits are "Yin"; and 
woman is "Yin." Although necessary, she is in- 
ferior, and must be held under firm control. The 
sages stressed the danger of letting women become 
educated and go about freely, for thus might 
women gain the upper hand and wreck society. 

The most beautiful and characteristic art-form 
in China — one you find repeated a thousand times 
— is the roadside "pailow" or ornamental stone 
portal. It commemorates always some act or life 
held worthy of universal honor. Now, a girl re- 
maining for life unwed, in case her betrothed died 
before their marriage, is considered worthy of a 
pailow. But they rear no pailow to the youth who 
remains single out of regard for his lost betrothed. 
Such constancy would be deemed weak and ridicu- 



188 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

lous, rather than noble. For from the male view- 
point it is fitting that woman be sacrificed to man, 
but not that man be sacrificed to woman. This 
was why, some centuries ago, the Chinese held 
that the widow ought to kill herself at her hus- 
band's funeral ; whereas the notion that a widower 
ought to do the same at his wife's funeral never 
entered the Celestial mind. 

The wife guilty of unfaithfulness is to be stoned, 
drowned, or hanged. But the men are fair; 
they don't intend that morality shall be "a jug- 
handled proposition." So public opinion holds 
that if a husband be found unfaithful, his wife has 
a right to scold him good and hard ; and he ought 
not to beat her for it, either. 

A class of Chinese students were horrified to 
learn from their teacher that in America a young 
man proposing marriage to a maiden might be 
refused. To them the rejection of a man by a 
mere woman implied a loss of "face" too dreadful 
to contemplate. 

A young mandarin taking office in another prov- 
ince may leave his wife behind to be a daughter to 
his parents in their declining years. Under the 
circumstances, nobody, not even his wife, thinks 
the less of him if he consoles himself by taking a 
"secondary wife" ; but the abandoned wife has no 
such means of "consoling" herself. Her part is 
constancy, no matter how long her lord's absence. 
Chinese law recognizes but one wife, and counte- 
nances the taking of a "secondary wife" only in 
case there is no male heir. But the men have 



UNBINDING THE WOMEN OF CHINA 189 

come to do about as they please and Chinese tell 
me that from three to five per cent, have one or 
more such concubines. One reason is that, while a 
man may not choose his wife, he can choose his 
concubine ; so he may have his love affair after all. 

At the height of summer the proportion of men 
in south and central China who go about in buff 
to the waist corresponds to the proportion of men 
in our Gulf States who go about in their shirt- 
sleeves. The women, on the other hand, never ap- 
pear save fully clothed and what they suffer in 
the damp heat of the airless lanes and the low 
dwellings beggars description. A girl playing 
tennis with her arm bare to the elbow, is more ex- 
posed than any woman you will see in China. 

The boy's upbringing is not shaped to please 
women. But everything in the upbringing of the 
girl — her foot-binding, " tottering lily" gait, hair 
dressing, skill in embroidery, innocence, ignorance, 
obedience — is obviously a catering to the male. 
No tinselled box of bon-bons is a plainer challenge 
for favor than is the bride when, on her wedding 
day, dressed to kill, loaded with all her finery and 
jewelry, her feet squeezed to their tiniest, her nails 
manicured, her cheeks rouged, her oiled hair as 
stiff and elaborate as a blackwood carving, she 
stands supported on either hand by a maid and, 
with downcast eye and expressionless face, en- 
dures the inspection of the wedding-guests. 

The women of the people — boat-women, water- 
carriers, servants, scavengers, fuel gatherers — 
come and go freely, but the women of the classes 



190 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

rarely go out save in a closed cart or a covered 
chair. For the most part they pass their lives 
within four walls, away from the stimulus of street 
and public resort. They have few acquaintances 
save relatives and, as life goes on, their circle of 
friends contracts rather than enlarges. Not for 
them picnics, excursions and feasts. Social di- 
version is organized for men, not for women. 
Toilet, opium-smoking, gossiping with the serv- 
ants, visits from a few friends — what a round! 
No wonder the doctors find their worst cases of 
nervous exhaustion among these victims of empti- 
ness and repression. 

But Nature punishes man's presumption. 
Shrewd observers agree that opium-smoking and 
gambling — both repugnant to the prudence and 
keen property sense of the race — are the beset- 
ting vices of the Chinese upper classes because 
of the vacuity of their lives; and this is the 
penalty for keeping woman "in her place." The 
masses have crippled and cowed their women till 
they can't make a home, and the classes have 
barred women from their social life. Ignorant 
of the freshness and charm that lies in the in- 
nocent association of the sexes, the men sought 
relief from ennui in pipe and dice and the women 
were beginning to solace themselves in the same 
way. 

Among the common people the sexes do not 
greatly differ in size; but, observing the great 
numbers of dainty silk-clad ladies going about 
the Nanking Exhibition, I could not but be struck 




>» Itll 

i- ■ ■ " ■ * 'C^S§Sd|^E 



. 




One of the south gates into the Tartar city, Peking 




Temple of Five Hundred Genii, Canton 



UNBINDING THE WOMEN OF CHINA 193 

by their smallness and frailness. They were of 
a stature with American girls of fourteen or 
fifteen. They seemed hardly larger than the 
women of Japan, though their men folk are much 
bigger than the Japanese men. It is not clear 
whether this diminutiveness is due to a prefer- 
ence for the little operating through many gener- 
ations, or to foot-binding, confinement, and lack 
of exercise during the growing period. 

In the Chinese family male predominance is 
mitigated by the sanctity of age. After the wife 
becomes the mother of a boy, her status rises and 
she is the envy of the women of India and Persia. 
Filial piety is owed as much to the mother as to 
the father. The mother, and still more the grand- 
mother, is nearly co-equal with her spouse in au- 
thority over her children. The detestable Ori- 
ental doctrine of the "Three Obediences," that 
woman is never to be free, but must pass her life 
under the tutelage, first of father, then of hus- 
band, and finally of son — does not hold in its last 
clause for the daughters of Han. 

As for the girl, bride, and wife, however, con- 
ventionality binds their hearts quite as cruelly 
as their feet. Because the married daughter 
with her children is lost to her parents and or- 
dinarily cannot care for them in their old age, 
from a tenth to a twentieth of the girl-babies — 
this on Chinese authority — are abandoned or 
done away with from economic reasons; but a 
boy-baby, never. Then, to escape the bother of 
raising a girl for some other family's benefit, it 



194 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

is quite common for the poor to give up their fe- 
male children to parents who want to rear wives 
for their sons. There are whole districts where 
never more than one daughter in a family is 
reared by her parents. This early separation 
of a girl from her natural parents is excused on 
the ground that it spares the shock of separa- 
tion when she marries! The girl thus reared in 
the future bridegroom's family is likely to be 
treated as a drudge and naturally, from the 
first,- she is subjected to the whims of her in- 
tended. I heard of a boy of six saying to the 
nurse-girl who had neglected his intended, aged 
two, "Why don't you look after my wife better?" 
In case the boy dies, the "widowed" girl's hand 
is disposed of by his parents and in the match 
little is considered save the bride-price. 

Even when the girl is reared at home, she is 
liable to be betrothed at an early age, and this 
grotesque practice is fraught with the most sin- 
ister possibilities. In one case, the son of a na- 
tive presiding elder was betrothed when a child 
to a little girl. At the proper age they were mar- 
ried, and then it was found that the bride was an 
idiot, her mental growth having been arrested 
by an attack of scarlet fever years before. After 
a year the son could stand it no longer and the 
girl was sent back to her parents. The action 
was denounced as a breach of custom and the 
elder had to stand a church trial. He was found 
guilty, every Chinese voting against him and 
every missionary for him! Again, the little 



UNBINDING THE WOMEN OF CHINA 195 

daughter of a farmer was betrothed to the son 
of a chair coolie. She showed talent, studied, 
rose in the schools, was helped through college, 
took a medical course and became a successful 
physician. Nevertheless, when the time came, she 
was obliged by inexorable custom to bow to the 
arrangement made for her in infancy and ruin 
her life by marrying a dolt too worthless to hold 
even a chair-bearer's job. 

There is pathos in the rising protest of the Chi- 
nese girl against early betrothal. She does not 
resent being yoked for life to a man she has never 
seen. But she does beg of her parents a hus- 
band who is fit for her now and a family-in-law 
that is now equal in social standing to her own, 
instead of being handed about in pursuance of a 
bargain entered into years before when no one 
could tell what her intended or his family might 
become. 

At best the maiden's marriage is arranged for 
her with a young man eligible so far as the pro- 
fessional match-maker can be trusted; and there 
is a proverb, "Ten match-makers, eleven liars." 
The horoscopes of the young people are com- 
pared, a card bearing the name and age of the 
girl lies for three days in front of the suitor's 
ancestral tablets, and if no ill omen appears she 
is taken. Not until the wedding does either 
know the other's name or look upon the other's 
face. No wooing, no love-making, no romance. 

Are they happy? Some observers — Germans 
and English, mark you, not American — judge that 



196 t THE CHANGING CHINESE 

such matches turn out as well as our own matings 
of free choice. They argue from the general 
domestic peace, and from the distress some hus- 
bands show when their wives are about to un- 
dergo a hospital operation. At such a crisis the 
hidden affection meets the eye. So they infer 
that the adaptability of the sexes in heart matters, 
when their expectations have not been keyed 
high, is greater than we have supposed. Now, 
it must be acknowledged that how happy we can 
be in our lot depends much on our notion of hap- 
piness. Miss Plumblossom has never included 
romantic love, tenderness and chivalry in her 
idea of a good husband; and so, provided he 
doesn't beat her and she has children upon whom 
she can lavish the pent-up wealth of her affection, 
she may find life tolerable. 

Still, forcing the natural feelings is a danger- 
ous business. The self-sacrifice and self-efface- 
ment that preserves domestic harmony in China 
is borne chiefly by the wives. The constant ef- 
fort at self-control and the ruthless repression 
of the feelings cost something. "Witness the nu- 
merous suicides of young wives. They throw 
themselves into wells or canals, or swallow raw 
opium. When the opium is harvested, there is 
a crop of female suicides. Insanity is distress- 
ingly frequent among women. The prevalence 
of neurasthenia among ladies refutes the saying 
that the Chinese have no nerves. Doctors as- 
sert there is much heart lesion among women 
owing to emotional stress and sorrowing. The 



UNBINDING THE WOMEN OF CHINA 197 

faces of wives are stamped with pain, patience 
and gentle resignation rather than happiness. 
Chinese women tell me the confidences made to 
them and their friends betray widespread unhap- 
piness. The custom of "crying one's wrongs" 
is significant. When a woman simply cannot 
stand it any longer, she proclaims her woes to 
the world. A thousand miles up the Yangtse 
I saw the wife of a tea-house keeper stand on the 
bank and yell to hundreds of grinning sampan 
people her opinion of the man. Hurrying 
through a hamlet late at night we came upon a 
solitary woman ululating her grievances to high 
heaven. Lights were out and all were asleep 
but she stood, lonely and pathetic, in the dark- 
ness repeating her cry, and took no notice of us 
by-passers. 

The disposal of superfluous female infants is a 
great strain on the mothers. In the presence of 
a lady missionary whom they supposed ignorant 
of their dialect a number of country-women fell 
to confessing the number of girl babies they had 
made away with. Finally she could contain her- 
self no longer and cried, "Oh, how could you be 
so cruel !" The women turned on her with al- 
most savage vehemence. "Do you think we 
didn't care? Would we do it if we didn't know 
the new one would take the rice out of the mouths 
of the others?" "Since then," the lady added, 
"I appreciate how infanticide is forced on par- 
ents by economic pressure." 

For the Chinese bride her mother-in-law is no 



198 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

joking matter. At sixteen or seventeen the girl 
becomes virtually the slave of this woman, and 
her husband dares not utter a word on her be- 
half. When the baby comes, it is not hers to 
rear; it is to be brought up just as her husband's 
mother says. The educated Christian girl is 
loath to marry into a heathen family for fear of 
having to misrear or lose her children under the- 
dictate of an ignorant and superstitious mother- 
in-law. The situation is really impossible and 
breeds dark tragedies. A woman doctor tells 
of being summoned in haste by a frantic husband 
and finding the young wife in travail with her 
mother-in-law sitting on her. The girl was roll- 
ing her eyes, and if the harridan had not been 
pulled off she would have died in a few minutes. 
Still, there are checks on a harsh mother-in-law. 
If the wife's family is strong, they can make her 
much trouble. Then the threat of suicide is 
potent, for one who commits suicide on your ac- 
count can haunt you. Besides it makes a great 
scandal. A friend of mine saw a woman whose 
daughter-in-law had killed herself on her account 
beat the dead girl's face in impotent rage at be- 
ing thus foiled and brought to shame. 

In the West suicides are three or four times 
as frequent among men as among women, part 
of the difference answering no doubt to a real 
difference in the psychology of the sexes. That 
among the Chinese suicide is five or ten times 
as frequent among females as among males 
throws a piercing ray of light on the happiness 



UNBINDING THE WOMEN OF CHINA 201 

of women in a man-made world. Most of these 
are young married women and young widows. 
The former take their lives because they are un- 
happy, the latter usually because they think it 
the fitting thing to do. (For, mark you, it is not 
yet two centuries since it was decreed that offi- 
cial honors were no longer to be conferred upon 
widows who slew themselves at their husband's 
death.) Now, the bonds that drive the brides 
to desperation and the ideas of wifely propriety 
that impel young widows to make away with 
themselves originated in the minds of men and 
have never been molded by so much as a feather's 
touch by the sex they affect. This great pre- 
ponderance of female suicide is a grim com- 
mentary on the theory that the happiness of 
women lies in their guardianship by the other sex. 
Nothing could be plainer than that woman's 
lot in China is not of her own fashioning, but has 
been shaped by male tastes and prejudices, with- 
out regard to what the women themselves think 
about it. The men have determined woman's 
sphere as well as man's. The ancient sages — 
all men — molded the institutions that bear upon 
women, and it is male comment, not really pub- 
lic opinion, that enforces the conventionalities 
that crush her. By wit, will, or worth, the in- 
dividual woman may slip from under the thumb 
of the individual man — there are many such 
cases — but never could the sex free itself from the 
domination of the male sex. The men had all 
the artillery — the time-hallowed teachings and 



202 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

institutions, — and all the small arms — current 
opinion and comment. Cribbed and confined, the 
women were without schooling, locomotion, ac- 
quaintance, conversation, stimulus, contact with 
affairs, access to ideas, or opportunity to work 
out their own point of view. 

It is not that the individual man selfishly rules 
the woman. It is not even that the one sex has de- 
liberately brought the other into subjection. It 
is rather that men, regarding themselves as the 
"Yang" principle of the species, and perfectly 
sure * of their own superiority in wisdom and 
virtue, have settled what is fit and proper, not 
only for themselves, but for women too. 

It all came out beautifully in a conversation I 
had with a Chinese gentleman who is promoting 
a revival of Confucianism. I admitted that the 
Chinese have better ideas than we as to what 
children owe their parents. "Still," I added, 
"you '11 admit, we have juster ideas as to the 
treatment of women." "Not at all," he replied. 
"The place Confucianism assigns to women is 
more reasonable than that of the Christian West. ' ' 

"But why should women be so subordinated?" 

"Because women are very hard to control. 
You can never tell what they will be up to. At 
the bottom of every trouble, there is a woman." 

"Isn't that due," I asked, "to your depriving 
women of the educational opportunities which 
they once enjoyed?" 

"No, it was precisely experience of the dif- 
ficulty of keeping women under control when 



UNBINDING THE WOMEN OF CHINA 203 

they are educated that led our forefathers to les- 
sen their schooling. ' ' 

"Then you would shut girls out of school ?" 

"No, I wouldn't go so far," he replied. "Let 
them be taught to read and write. ' ' 

"Nothing more?" 

"Possibly. But it should be very different 
from the education given to boys. ' ' 

"For example?" 

"Why, teach the girl household arts and ethics 
so she will know her duties as daughter, wife and 
mother. ' ' 

"Would you teach her her rights as well as her 
duties?" I insinuated. 

"No, no. That is quite unnecessary." 

My frank Confucian went on to deplore that 
nowadays in Hong Kong Chinese ladies come 
and go in the streets "just like harlots." 
" Surely," I protested, "such freedom makes 
them happier and that is something." "No, the 
unity of the family should be put above individual 
happiness, and that unity is found in the unop- 
posed will of the husband." 

How Roman it all is — just the views that Livy 
puts in the mouth of Cato the Elder I 1 Man, the 

i" Recollect all the institutions respecting the sex, by which 
our forefathers restrained them and subjected them to their hus- 
bands; and yet, even with the help of all these restrictions, they 
can scarcely be kept within bounds. If, then, you suffer them to 
throw these off one by one, to tear them all asunder, and, at last, to be 
set on an equal footing with yourselves, can you imagine that they 
will be any longer tolerable? Suffer them once to arrive at an 
equality with you, and they will from that moment become your 
superiors." 



204 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

main stem of the race, woman, a "side issue," as 
Prentice put it. When, a couple of years ago, 
the prefect proposed a school for girls at Feng- 
siangfu, an old scholar exclaimed "Open a girls' 
school ! "When women take to reading, what will 
there be for the men to do f ' ' 

Of course, hearing men harp on it so much, 
Chinese women come to believe they are stupid 
and need control. Still, some find their way to 
a sense of grievance, even when no foreigner has 
put into their heads the idea of "rights." 
'Some years ago nine Cantonese maidens 
drowned themselves together one night in the 
Pearl River rather than accept the lot of the wife. 
In three districts in central Kuangtung, where a 
girl can always get work at silk-winding, thou- 
sands of girls have formed themselves into anti- 
matrimonial associations, the members of which 
refuse to live with the husband more than the 
customary three days. Then they take advantage 
of their legal right "to visit mother" and never 
return save on certain days or after a term of 
years. If the parents attempt to restore the run- 
away bride to her husband she drowns herself or 
takes opium ; so parents and magistrates have had 
to let the girls have their way. By presenting 
herself in her husband's home on certain festival 
days the bride keeps her wifely status, and if her 
spouse takes to himself a more tractable mate, 
she becomes the "number one" wife, and the mis- 
tress of the other. 

It is a striking illustration of what women can 



UNBINDING THE WOMEN OF CHINA 205 

do when they have a chance at self-support. In 
general, however, it is foreign influence rather 
than industrial opportunity that is emancipating 
the women. Christianity is doing its share. 
The reading of the New Testament exalts women 
in their own eyes and in the eyes of others. The 
radiant peace and uplift of soul I have seen on 
some Christian faces reveal what a moral treasure 
the Chinese have kept locked up all these cen- 
turies. I do not wonder that villagers took a 
certain saintly Bible woman to be ' ' some relative 
of God." The missionary home is a silent but 
telling object lesson. After a woman missionary 
had been talking to a group of women about 
Heaven, one of them said, "It would be heaven 
enough for me to have my husband walk beside 
me on the street as yours does with you." The 
converts are taught to cherish their daughter and 
to give her schooling. They are forbidden to 
override her will in marriage and are urged to 
inquire into the young man's disposition and 
to consider whether he can make her happy. 
The girl is to see him, or at least hear all 
about him, and may reject him without incurring 
reproach. 

As in foot-unbinding, so in mind-unbinding, 
the missionaries have been pioneers. The early 
pupils of their schools are now grandmothers, 
while the first class of non-mission girls was 
graduated only three years ago. At first, to be 
sure, they administered knowledge in homeopathic 
doses. In the early years of one school the girls 



206 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

were taught to read, but not to write, lest they 
pen notes to the boys ! In the same school they 
taught just Bible, and the girls memorized great 
quantities. The pupils could repeat you Genesis 
by the hour, skipping from Ch. IX to Ch. XVII, 
if you liked, and taking up the thread again with 
perfect readiness. Twenty years ago the course 
was enriched by natural theology, Church history, 
arithmetic, geography and music. Five years ago 
English and history were added. In another 
school — British — I found the girls feasting from 
the following menu: "Forenoon — New Testa- 
ment, text with exposition. Afternoon — Old 
Testament history." 

The missionaries feel the ground swell of the 
great "woman's movement" at home and their 
ideas are continually broadening. Granted they 
have taught the girls obedience and are proud 
when parents report that their daughter from the 
mission school is the most dutiful of their children. 
But every lady principal of a mission school is at 
heart a sworn enemy of the Chinese subjection of 
women. That is not her role, of course, and she 
will fence with you at first; but finally, if you 
seem trustworthy, she will own up. She does not 
egg the girls on to assert this or that right, but 
she strives to build up in them a personality that 
will not accept the old status. One doctor in 
charge of a women's medical school exhorts her 
young women to shun marriage on the present 
terms. When a mission-school girl horrifies her 
family by refusing to abide by a child-betrothal, 




No chance for them 




Joss house, Foochow, and Baby Tower where girl infants 
are thrown when not wanted 



UNBINDING THE WOMEN OF CHINA 209 

her teachers, though never interfering, give her 
"moral support." 

Education, of course, delays marriage. Ten 
years ago, most of the girls entered the high 
school betrothed, but now they are teasing their 
parents to give them an education first, and many 
girls of nineteen or twenty are not yet engaged. 
One begins even to meet the Chinese school-mis- 
tress, who teaches awhile before marrying. "With 
the establishing of numerous schools for girls by 
the Chinese themselves within the last five years, 
there has come a great demand for educated 
Chinese women, and the graduates of the mission 
schools are sought as teachers, matrons, and even 
principals. Fathers who turned a deaf ear to 
their daughter's plea for an education are relent- 
ing now that they hear of the fine salaries educated 
young women are bringing to their parents. 

The taste for the prettyfied, insipid doll-wife is 
going out wherever the other type is known. The 
college young man prefers an educated wife and in 
the matrimonial market the girls with schooling go 
off like hot cakes. The lady principal, who used 
to receive such inquiries only from parents, is now 
frequently called upon by very polite young men 
who inquire minutely into the scholarship and 
accomplishments of this or that pupil. Can she 
sing 1 ? Can she play the piano? Does she know 
English? Formerly the inquirer mentioned the 
girl as "the daughter of So-and-So"; now he 
speaks of her as ' ' Miss So-and-So. ' ' The smitten 
never addresses himself directly to the charmer, 



210 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

but his parents negotiate with her parents and 
presently the wedding cards are out. 

Inch by inch the old customs are yielding. 
Courtship is unheard of ; but here and there young 
people converse under parental eyes. Even when 
they may not talk together, they are permitted 
to see each other across a room; or photographs 
are exchanged. In any case, the young people in- 
sist on knowing what kind of a parti is proposed 
for them. The rearing marriage and the child- 
betrothal have vanished from enlightened circles. 
Strange to relate, the high school girls do not 
greatly object to a match arranged for them. 
What they are wildly athirst for is not Romance 
so much as Freedom. Freedom from parents, 
from husband, from mother-in-law, from strang- 
ling conventionalities. They hear of the larger 
life open to their sisters of the West and they 
wildly beat their tender wings against the gilded 
wires of their cage. 

The new opportunities alter the relation of 
mother to daughter. The mother is old-fashioned 
and no mentor for Angelina. As an educated 
young lady put it, ' * Really, it is the daughter who 
must act the chaperone. Mother's ideas of pro- 
priety and conversation are so different from 
those of the new conditions that I am having con- 
tinually to make suggestions to her." 

In Tientsin, Hong Kong and Shanghai, girls of 
the well-to-do classes imagine that "Western 
style" means pure freedom, and do not realize 
the unspoken restraints our young people are 



UNBINDING THE WOMEN OF CHINA 211 

under. These " liberty girls," as they are called, 
think they must settle their heart affairs by them- 
selves, quite unaware how often parental guid- 
ance prevents our daughters making a mistake. 
Sometimes, indeed, to get any freedom at all in 
heart matters, the girl has to elope, and naturally 
such matches rarely turn out well. One school- 
girl, in order to avoid having a distasteful mar- 
riage forced upon her, ran off to Japan with two 
students and from there wrote her parents that she 
had n't yet made up her mind which she loved best 
and would marry ! 

Towards spring the water of a frost-bound 
Northern lake becomes so deoxygenated that if a 
hole is cut in the ice the fishes press so frantically 
to the life-giving air that some are pushed out on 
to the ice. Nevertheless, oxygen is good for fish. 
Just so, when foreign example breaks a hole in 
the rigid custom that confines Chinese woman- 
hood, the eager rush of young women toward the 
life-giving liberty and knowledge may leave some 
of them clear outside their native element. 
Nevertheless, liberty and knowledge are good for 
young women. 

The schools under missionary control, however, 
meet the current need better than the govern- 
ment schools. A noble Chinese woman physician, 
a graduate of the University of Michigan, tells 
me that at their own girls ' schools the girls learn 
license rather than liberty. She makes the point 
that only a Christian education gives the girls the 
moral restraints that are necessary if they are to 



212 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

be free from the old tutelage. She is right. It is 
a trying world the educated Chinese girl enters, 
for the young men are far from ready to appre- 
ciate her or show her the delicacy and chivalry that 
environ our American girls. "How long will it 
be," I asked a Manchu lady familiar with life East 
and West, "before your mothers will let their 
daughters go buggy-riding of an evening with 
your college boys?" Like a flash came the an- 
swer, l ' A hundred years ! ' ' 

Among the thoughtful the conviction spreads 
that China can never be great while the mothers 
of each generation are left ignorant and uncared 
for. They are coming to realize the role of the 
mother in molding the character of her sons. 
China needs, above all, men, of a high unwaver- 
ing integrity, and she will not grow them while 
the impressible boyhood years are passed in 
the company of an unschooled, narrow-minded, de- 
spised, neglected woman. Certain missionaries 
overlooked, at first, the strategic position of the 
mother, and were presently horrified to find the 
children of Christian men reverting to heathenism 
because their mothers had been left untaught ! 

We know that the mothers of Confucius and 
Mencius had a great share in forming the charac- 
ter of their illustrious sons, and it is significant 
that the Chinese have brought forth not one 
great man since they took to binding the feet and 
the minds of their daughters. All who work 
with the women of the yellow race are enthu- 
siastic over their possibilities. But no testi- 




One of two hundred day schools organized by a 
Foochow missionary 




A bride's canopy, Peking 



UNBINDING THE WOMEN OF CHINA 215 

monials are needed. Their faces are full of 
character — as fine as the faces of women any- 
where. All the railroads that may be built, all 
the mines that may be opened, all the trade that 
may be fostered, cannot add half as much to the 
happiness of the Chinese people as the cultiva- 
tion of the greatest of their " undeveloped re- 
sources ' ' — their womanhood. 



CHAPTER IX 

CHEISTIANITY IN CHINA 

IT was vesper service at the Lama temple in 
Peking. A score of young priests, with 
shaven polls, sat on low benches amid the shining 
altars, images, and candelabra, while the sweet 
incense wreathed and rose before the great golden 
Buddha. Cross-legged on a dais, sat the leader, 
a wrinkled Thibetan, arrayed in gorgeous vest- 
ments of gold brocade. Before each cantor lay a 
pile of long parchment slips, containing the even- 
ing liturgy in Thibetan characters. The words 
of the service were chanted rapidly in unison, in 
a deep, musical tone, and the effect was like the 
droning of bees from a thousand hives. Ever 
and anon came bursts of wild clangor that went 
through one like a knife; cymbals would clash, 
drums would throb, and horns of fantastic 
Chaldean shape would snarl. It was a tapestry, 
— for the ear, not for the eye, — weird arabesques 
of instrumental sound thrown against a back- 
ground of deep droning. 

Over against these set the achievements of a 
certain Swedish-American missionary I found in 
a district town in the most opium-ridden and foot- 
bound province of China. After eight years of 
work he has gathered a band of two hundred 

216 



CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA 217 

Chinese Christians, most of them men and from 
the country. Thirty are school-teachers, of 
whom twelve have the first degree. Many of 
his members are prominent people, though none 
are officials. The mandarins are very friendly, 
but he is slow to cultivate intimacy with them, 
lest his converts who have lawsuits should im- 
portune him for his " influence." He allows 
none of his flock to disobey the Anti-Opium Edict, 
and lately he cast out twenty members for grow- 
ing poppy. Recently he had a revival in his 
church, and many openly confessed their sins 
and made reparation. There is nothing flabby 
about the Christianity that prompts men to lay 
bare murder and robbery. Being a follower of 
Luther, he does not require his flock to keep the 
Sabbath in the Puritan sense. He maintains an 
opium refuge, where in the winter one hundred 
and sixteen smokers were treated from a month 
to six weeks, and most were permanently cured. 
There is a school where thirty girls follow a nine- 
years course. At his instigation, a "natural- 
foot" society was formed among the leading 
Chinese, and two hundred non-Christian girls 
and women have unbound their feet. Who will 
deny that this is "religion pure and undefiled'"? 
The religious plane of the Chinese will hardly 
command the admiration of any Occidental, how- 
ever catholic his sympathy. The followers of 
Confucius, it is true, promulgate a pure and 
lofty morality, but Confucianism is not really a 
religion at all, but an ethical system, and has, 



218 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

moreover, little authority outside the learned 
clan. Taoism, starting as mysticism, has degen- 
erated into a hotch-potch of the crudest and 
tawdriest superstitions. As for the Buddhism 
of China, let no one look to find in it the golden 
thoughts of the Great Teacher or even the spir- 
itual elevation of the Buddhism one finds to-day 
in Burma and Japan. To the spirit of the Sutras 
it is about as foreign as the Coptic church 
of Abyssinia is to the spirit of the Gospels. Not 
one„ priest in a hundred has any glimmering of 
the Eight-fold Path. The nunneries have a very 
bad name. Only now and then in the monaster- 
ies does one come upon reminiscences of the great 
traditions of the faith. 

To the ranging eye, the fruits brought forth 
by the religions of China appear to be number- 
less temples, dingy and neglected; countless 
dusty idols portraying hideous deities in violent 
attitudes expressive of the worst passions; an 
army of ignorant priests, as skeptical as Koman 
augurs, engaged in divining, exorcising, and 
furnishing funeral ceremonies for gain; and a 
laity superstitious and irreverent, given to per- 
functory kotowing and prayer prompted by the 
most practical motives. The passing traveler 
notes sacred trees with bits of red cloth flutter- 
ing from the twigs; brick screens built just in- 
side gateways and doorways to check the invisi- 
ble, rushing demons of the air; wayside shrines 
ever redolent with lighted joss-sticks left for 
good luck by passing coolies; cliffs carved into 



CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA 219 

hundreds of niches, each sheltering the effigy of 
some god or saint; idols with faces repulsive 
from the sacrificial blood smeared on their 
lips; jutting boulders and fantastic rocks black- 
ened with incense smoke and stuck up with the 
feathers of sacrificed fowls; and house-boats 
protected at every point by a smoking joss-stick, 
with the bow red with the blood of the cock killed 
at the outset of the voyage. 

In a temple in Soochow one sees in a corner 
a great heap of broken idols, the massive frag- 
ments showing the sticks, straw, and mud out of 
which they were made. Thereby hangs a tale 
that might have been brought to Rome from 
Friesland in the eighth century. Not long ago 
a reforming official, observing that idols had be- 
come a ruinous infatuation among his people, 
drew a great crowd by announcing a duel to the 
death between himself and the idols. Putting 
one end of a rope about his own neck and the 
other about the neck of a big idol, he said, "If 
the idol is stronger than I am, I shall be stran- 
gled; but if I am the stronger, the idol will fall." 
Trusting to his bull neck, the mandarin pulled, 
the idols tumbled, and since then the spirit of St. 
Thomas is abroad in Soochow. 

At this moment the religious impact of the 
West upon China is delivered by fourteen hun- 
dred Roman Catholic missionaries and four thou- 
sand Protestant missionaries, of whom, how- 
ever, fully a thousand are wives, and therefore 
not always free to do full work. The Roman 



220 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

Catholic work is three centuries old, and more 
than a million baptized Chinese are in its fold. 
The Protestant work is the growth of a century, 
and about half a million are within its churches, 
although its communicants do not exceed two 
hundred thousand. Most of what follows re- 
lates to Protestant missions, for the writer has 
had little opportunity to come into touch with the 
Eoman Catholic corps. 

To the untutored Chinamen the presence of the 
missionary is a puzzle. They simply cannot im- 
agine human beings exiling themselves from their 
native land for the love of men on the other 
side of the globe. So they frame sundry theories 
to explain the thing to themselves. One the- 
ory is that the missionaries are secret political 
agents bent on gaining an influence over the 
Chinese, and then swaying them to the advan- 
tage of their respective governments. Only of 
late have the natives come to realize that the 
strangers are not sent by their governments, but 
by religious groups. According to another the- 
ory, China is so excellent and renowned that 
the red-haired barbarians come to live there for 
the mere pleasure of it. As for their self-deny- 
ing works of benevolence, these are supposed to 
be prompted by the desire to acquire merit. 

Unlike the Mohammedan end of Asia, the Far 
East is not intense in its religious beliefs. The 
Chinese are Gallios in such matters, and their 
occasional mobbings of missionaries are not in 
the least outbreaks of fanatical intolerance. They 




tllf' IBS. *-! 




u 



High altar of a Buddhist temple of the 
Kushan Monastery 




Temple in a gorge, Kushan Monastery 



CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA 223 

are in part explosions of anti-foreign feeling 
generated in this most patient of peoples by 
opium wars, the enforced opium trade, the com- 
pulsory opening of ports, extra-territoriality, 
high-handed seizures of territory, and like buf- 
fets to national pride inflicted by the mailed fist 
of Western powers. The missionary has no 
part in these, but when the black thunder-clouds 
of hatred roll up, he, as the nearest foreigner, 
receives the lightning stroke. Other violences 
against him have been deliberately stirred up by 
the slanders set afloat among the credulous 
masses by the literary and official class, who fear 
lest the missionary introduce ideas which will 
make it harder to maintain the old system of 
governing and exploiting the common people. 
But for what is miscalled "forcing Christianity 
on China," — by which is meant requiring the 
intolerant Imperial Government to allow teach- 
ers of religion to travel, live, and work un- 
molested in all parts of the Empire, — the selfish 
statecraft of the rulers would have deprived the 
people for generations of what the missionaries 
bring them. 

As the Chinese come to know the strangers 
better, and to perceive the pure motives behind 
their gentle invasion, they discriminate more 
sharply between them and those aggressive white 
men who are in the Far East not to help China, 
but to make something out of her. The last five 
years have been marked by a rapidly growing 
entente cordiale between the missionaries and the 



224 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

better elements in Chinese society. The assail- 
ants of opium and foot-binding gratefully own 
their debt to the strangers. One mandarin went 
circuit-riding through his district with the local 
missionary, both speaking for opium reform 
from the same platform. The friends of the new 
education realize how much China owes to the 
mission schools, which have long been turning 
out men fitted to communicate Western learning. 
Lately one often hears of high officials honoring 
the commencement exercises of such schools 
with their presence and words. One provincial 
assembly attended a church conference in a 
body, and its vice-president and secretary spoke 
fearlessly for their Christian faith. In the in- 
terior, where there are no traders to inspire dis- 
like for the white man, the missionary often finds 
the mandarin not only appreciative, but even 
sympathetic and friendly. 

Very striking is the contrast between the Eng- 
lish mission work and the American. The Eng- 
lish missionaries center their efforts largely on 
translating and evangelizing, while the Ameri- 
cans have done much in the medical and educa- 
tional fields as well. In the higher education 
their lead is almost a monopoly. Of fourteen 
Protestant mission "colleges" and "universi- 
ties," only one is maintained by the British; the 
rest are American or union. The English mis- 
sionary at the head of Shansi University de- 
clares: "British missionaries, with British con- 
servatism, have held too much to the idea that 







A wealthy Shansi family of foreig'iiizing tendencies 




Monks of Kushan Monastery 



CHEISTIANITY IN CHINA 227 

their office is to evangelize and heal, not to en- 
lighten the mind. But the American has also 
applied himself directly to the root of China's 
pressing temporal need, and spent a hundred 
times as much money — nay, more — on education 
as British Missions have done." 

This difference betrays a profound contrast in 
social creed. Most of the British missionary 
societies, while solicitous for the eternal welfare 
of the Chinese, have no thought whatever of rais- 
ing him intellectually or socially. The Ameri- 
can societies, with their democratic faith in men, 
aspire to help the Chinese upward along all lines. 
One reason, perhaps, for the apathy of the Brit- 
ish, is the failure of university opportunities to 
Christianize the Hindu students in India, and 
the trouble that has been stirred up there by 
educated Hindus. But one also sees that the 
British simply do not believe in education as the 
Americans do. 

It is certain that the American missionaries, 
by their literary and educational labors, are do- 
ing far more to Christianize Chinese public opin- 
ion, laws, and institutions, than their equally 
learned and devoted English brethren. All 
groups, however, recognize how hopeless it is to 
convert the Chinese by missionary preaching. 
The West cannot send out men enough to evan- 
gelize a population so vast over a land so huge. 
Thirty or forty thousand workers would be needed. 
Then, too, the missionary rarely gains such mas- 
tery of the language that all barriers between 



228 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

the Chinese mind and his vanish. On the other 
hand, the capacity and character of the yellow 
race is becoming apparent to all. So the mis- 
sionaries realize that their part is to man the 
needed colleges and theological schools and to 
supervise the work in the field, while the actual 
evangelization of China is to be carried on by the 
trained native, costing a sixth as much to main- 
tain as the foreign missionary. 

It is fortunate that, as this directive function 
comes to the fore, a type is coming into the field 
quite unlike the early missionary. These young 
men, most of them "student volunteers," have 
squarer shoulders, a harder grip, a keener eye, 
a terser speech, and a greater zest for outdoor 
sports. They are more careful to conserve 
health and " fitness." They pass fewer hours at 
their devotions, and keep more in touch with 
their time. They have broader intellectual in- 
terests, and through their social and athletic 
bent find points of sympathetic contact with the 
treaty-port people. In faith, self-devotion, and 
heroism there is nothing to choose between the 
old missionary and the new. Perhaps the former 
had a sublimer patience, a deeper humility. But 
the latter is better fitted to meet the new mood 
that is coming over the Chinese. He is not con- 
tent with inspiring a saving faith; he aims at 
an all-round transformation, — what he calls 
"making the Kingdom of God come in China," 
— and he is quite as likely to succeed as if he 
aimed at less. 



CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA 229 

What manly pith the work requires may he 
gleaned from the varied activities of a young 
missionary in Fokien whom I observed for three 
or four days last year. A successful life- 
insurance agent who gave up everything to obey 
the "call," he is now in charge of three districts, 
each with its presiding elder, a score of na- 
tive pastors, and perhaps thirty congregations. 
He preaches, holds conference, dedicates 
churches, examines candidates for the ministry, 
rebukes, encourages, and directs. He passes the 
long hours in his sedan chair making observa- 
tions on bird life which are gladly printed by the 
Smithsonian Institution. When a man-eating 
tiger terrifies the villagers, he takes a couple of 
days off, slays the beast, and gives it, stuffed, to 
the museum of his church college. Although 
ignorant of architecture, he has to supervise the 
construction of a big stone church to seat twenty- 
five hundred, ordering the tearing out of badly 
laid sections of wall and devising means of sup- 
porting a roof of forty-five feet span. With the 
money he secures from his friends he runs a 
school with five teachers that supports one hun- 
dred and fifty boys. The spacious compound, 
with its thirty thousand dollars' worth of build- 
ings and its nine-foot wall, is a bit of the twen- 
tieth century projected into the thirteenth. 
When a bullet is fired at midnight into a teach- 
er's room, he has to confer with the anxious 
mandarins and assure them that he will not com- 
plain to his consul if they will see that the 



230 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

outrage is not repeated. Thus this cheery, 
masterful American goes about, speaking the 
dialect, judging, conferring, deciding, organizing, 
a real field-marshal of militant Christianity. 

The old taunt of "rice-Christian" still raises 
doubts as to the quality of the mission harvest. 
A Confucian gentleman will tell you that the 
genuine convert is greatly improved in charac- 
ter, but that most of the adherents are self-seek- 
ers, who impose on the missionaries. The lay 
critic points out that for his knowledge of the 
character and standing of the applicant the mis- 
sionary depends on his native evangelist, who 
may have his own ax to grind. On the other 
hand, it is a fact that the converts receive no 
material aid, but are expected to contribute un- 
til their church has become self-supporting. In 
the distributing of famine relief no discrimi- 
nation is made between believer and unbeliever. 
Still, there are worldly motives for turning 
Christian, and the seasoned missionaries make 
the inquirer wait long before baptizing him. 
They are all eager to see tokens of sincerity, and 
one whose most respected members had just laid 
bare their gross sins during a revival confessed 
that a load had been lifted from his heart. Per- 
haps the best proof that the missionaries are 
not garnering hypocrites is the fact that ten thou- 
sand Protestant and thirty thousand Eoman 
Catholic converts perished in the Boxer upris- 
ing. Many of these could have saved their lives 




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CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA 233 

by trampling on a piece of paper bearing the 
character for " Jesus." 

It would be a gross error to assume that the 
missionary is intent solely on imparting a saving 
faith. With him doctrine figures by no means so 
prominently as with us or as in the earlier mis- 
sionary work. He aims to effect a profound and 
far-reaching transformation in the life of the 
convert. This implies a startling change in 
fundamental values. Practical in his religion, 
as in everything else, the ordinary Chinese re- 
gards his "joss" as a source of worldly benefit. 
From it he seeks restoration to health, good 
crops, success in the literary examinations, pros- 
perity in business, or official preferment. He 
is amazed at the offer of a religion that will prom- 
ise none of these things unless they are "best" 
for him, that guarantees in answer to prayer 
only spiritual blessings, such as patience, cour- 
age, and victory over temptation. A mockery it 
seems at first, and a paradox. But he notices 
that the Christians are serene of brow, and their 
meekness under persecution argues a hidden 
source of strength ; and presently it occurs to him, 
"What if this inner life should be, after all, the 
main thing?" 

With Christianity comes also a marked change 
in ideals. Undeveloped though they are, the 
Chinese, as a race, are not one whit behind us in 
capacity for idealism. St. Augustine, no doubt, 
found our heathen forefathers far less promis- 



234 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

ing material. They are moved by charity, pu- 
rity, and forgiveness, just as we are. The read- 
ing of the Gospels stirs in them the same secret 
better self that it stirs in us. There are many 
to whom the Christ ideal appeals as a new and 
better life, and they embrace it for the sake of 
inward peace rather than because of the super- 
natural authority of Christianity. 

One who really enters into the spirit of the New 
Testament seems to experience a wonderful up- 
lift and happiness. It delivers him in a great 
degree from the fears that have haunted him — 
the fear of misfortune, the fear of disease, and, 
above all, the fear of death. Oriental life and 
thought offer but a cheerless outlook to the 
meditative soul, and to such a one the religion 
from the West offers a true vita nuova. To 
judge from the beatific expression on the faces 
of certain superior converts I have met, the Gos- 
pel means to them what the opening of the hatches 
of a captured slave-ship meant to the wretches 
pent up in its hold. 

Besides, the missionaries open more windows 
than one would think. The wards and sleeping 
rooms of the Asile de la Sainte Enfance at Hong 
Kong are kept wonderfully clean and neat. One 
old native woman recently admitted and lying at 
the point of death was being instructed by a 
Chinese pastor in Christian doctrine and was 
told of Heaven where everything is beautiful and 
she would be happy. "Why," she remonstrated, 
"should I want to go to Heaven? Can it be 



CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA 235 

finer than this? I am perfectly happy in this 
beautiful place and don't want to die and dwell 
in Heaven." Poor soul, after a lifetime of strug- 
gle with dirt and confusion her martyrized wom- 
an's instinct for order and cleanliness had at last 
found satisfaction! 

The break of the genuine convert with his past 
is far more abrupt than anything with which we 
are familiar. He turns his back on opium, 
gambling, and unchastity, the besetting sins of 
his fellows. He abandons cheating, lying, back- 
biting, quarreling, and filthy language, which are 
all too rife among the undisciplined common peo- 
ple. He shuns litigation, often the ruin of the 
villager. By withdrawing from the festivals in 
the ancestral hall and from the rites at the 
graves of his ancestors, he sunders himself from 
his clan and incurs persecution. Thus the con- 
verts become separatists, with the merits and 
defects of separatists. Cut off from the world 
and thrown on one another, they form a group 
apart, a body of Puritans that will one day be 
a precious nucleus of moral regeneration for 
China. 

The over-sanguine dream of a great ingather- 
ing in case Christianity, from being merely 
tolerated, should become one of the recognized 
religions of the empire, or even the official re- 
ligion. No doubt recognition would encourage 
many a promising youth to declare himself, who 
even now believes, but dreads handicap in his 
official career. The wiser missionaries, how- 



236 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

ever, realize that adversity and persecution 
are a bracing atmosphere for the infant church, 
and spare it an influx of the worldly-minded, with 
whose Oriental wiliness and subtlety the mission- 
aries are not fitted to cope. 

This feeling is deepened by the fact that every 
strong popular drift toward Christianity that has 
set in in this or that district or province has been 
prompted by worldly motives. Again and again 
tidings have come of wonderful "mass move- 
ments" toward the church, which have raised 
high~ hopes of a sudden and wholesale conversion 
of the Chinese. But always it came out at last 
that the movement had been inspired by the hope 
of gaining missionary support in lawsuits or 
winning the approval of the mandarins or en- 
joying consular protection in times of trouble. 
In one district of Kiang-si, in 1901-02, a single 
enthusiastic missionary gathered in twenty thou- 
sand souls, and numerous self-supporting con- 
gregations arose. But presently the proselytes 
went to settling old scores with their Eoman 
Catholic enemies, and the new missionary sent 
out to sift the wheat from the chaff found him- 
self, after a year of church discipline, with only 
a hundred faithful. For a generation it will be 
impossible to make headway in the district where 
this bubble burst. Such cases make the experi- 
enced very apathetic toward mass movements 
and mushroom growths, and there is a deepen- 
ing conviction that spiritual Christianity ad- 



CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA 239 

vances only by winning individuals, never by at- 
tracting masses. 

The gentry and literati have been wont to de- 
spise the new religion from the "West. Looking 
upon us as cunning and formidable barbarians, 
they have heeded our missionaries about as much 
as the circle of Maecenas would have heeded 
Gaulish apostles of Druidism. Of late, however, 
their self-complacency has been dealt some stag- 
gering blows, and they are more willing to hear 
what the foreigner has to say. Certain mission- 
aries report that their listeners are from a more 
intelligent class and that the questions with which 
the preacher is plied at the close show marked 
intellectual acumen. 

Although the missionaries have gained few con- 
verts from the superior social classes, they have 
attracted a superior element from the middle and 
lower classes. The majority of a native Christian 
congregation resemble the general population, but 
a study of their physiognomy shows a greater 
frequency of noble or intellectual faces. Among 
a score of farmers in a little congregation gath- 
ered to dedicate a country chapel in Fokien, I 
noticed four fine faces and one peasant who might 
have sat to Leonardo da Vinci for his St. John. 
In view of the human quality of these Christians, 
I did not marvel on learning that the chapel, cost- 
ing two hundred and fifty dollars, had been built 
by twelve families out of their own resources, 
and that every stick of timber in it had been car- 



240 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

ried on their shoulders from the sea-coast, a 
league away. 

Kino wing how little the modern woman's move- 
ment in the West owes to churchmen, one is sur- 
prised to see how potent is Christianity for the 
uplift of the women of the Far East. But in 
China the present need of woman is not industrial 
and social opportunity so much as improve- 
ment in her lot as daughter and wife. Thanks 
to the exalted place of the parent, the position 
of the mother, with reference to her children or 
her daughters-in-law, leaves little to be desired. 

The missionaries have not proclaimed the 
"rights of women" nor insisted upon the full 
equality of the sexes. But the women converts 
gain from the reading of the New Testament 
ideas of their dignity, and come to feel that they 
have rights which ought to be respected. It 
gives them courage to become Bible women, 
teachers, and physicians. From the same source 
the man learns to look upon his wife in a new 
light and to feel that he owes her love and re- 
spect. He substitutes persuasion for coercion, 
and concedes her full authority in certain mat- 
ters, such as the management of the household 
or the direction of the servants. One man told 
how formerly he had looked upon his wife as a 
mere toy, but since conversion he had come to 
love her and consult her, and, to his surprise, he 
had found that often her judgment was sounder 
than his. He blushed as he confessed that he 
"loved" his wife, for the Chinese never talk 



CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA 241 

about such feelings. It is a fact that Christians 
have the name of making good husbands, and are 
preferred as sons-in-law even by unbelieving 
parents. 

Because she marries young and can do little 
for her parents in their old age, the daughter is 
of slight account among the common people. 
Chinese gentlemen have told me that perhaps a 
tenth of the female infants are made away with. 
One woman I heard of had drowned eight. An- 
other went raving mad every time she saw her 
husband, who had taken from her her three baby 
daughters and sold them. Now, into this situa- 
tion Christianity projects certain new and very 
emphatic teachings. The convert is urged to 
cherish and educate his daughter instead of treat- 
ing her as a burden. He is to give her at least a 
primary education, so that she may be able to read 
her Bible. "When she comes of marriageable age, 
she finds herself far better off than other girls. 
To be sure, she is not courted after the manner of 
the West ; but she may be permitted to look upon 
her suitor, and, in any case, she is fully informed 
as to his disposition and attainments. She may 
even refuse to marry the chosen suitor without in- 
curring the crushing reproach of being "unfilial." 
Among the common Chinese, marriage negotia- 
tions are conducted in a very practical spirit, 
money being the chief consideration; but the 
Christian parents feel it their duty to consider 
first the happiness of their daughter. 

The male converts cling to the husband's head- 



242 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

ship, buttressing their position with Pauline 
texts, and are reluctant to admit that deaconesses 
can be the full equals of deacons; but more and 
more the woman's position in the church reflects 
contemporary opinion in England and America 
rather than the dicta of St. Paul. 

In the older church buildings of South China, 
in deference to Chinese notions of propriety, 
a five-foot screen was set up, hiding the women's 
side from the men's side, but these screens 
are coming down. Formerly there was much 
objection in the better families to the attend- 
ance of unmarried girls at church, but now you 
see the maidens sitting in mother's pew with 
their eyes modestly lowered, and looking very 
sweet with their glossy brown hair falling in a 
snood down the back. Ten years ago women 
never testified in religious meetings; but now 
they speak and pray freely, and the most winning 
revivalist in China to-day is a young Chinese 
woman. 

Some scoffers insist that missions exist to turn 
out converts, just as a factory exists to turn out 
shoes. Divide your annual outlay by the number 
of new communicants, and you arrive at the av- 
erage cost of converting a Chinaman. Now, let 
conversion be conceived as a mere reminting 
which changes, indeed, the image and super- 
scription of the coin, but not its metal, and there 
is a sting in the gibe, "Is it worth while to con- 
vert Buddhists into Baptists at so many dollars 
the head?" 



CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA 245 

Now, tlie truth is, that, in the very nature of 
the case, by far the larger part of their ac- 
complishment can never be claimed by the mis- 
sionaries as their own. They dig the well and 
toil at the windlass, but the waters they raise do 
not flow in an open conduit to the fields they 
quicken. Most of them disappear in the ground, 
and when they reappear to make distant wastes 
bloom, they cannot be identified. "What of the 
young men leaving the mission colleges uncon- 
verted, yet imbued with Christian ideals? "What 
of the bracing effect on the government schools 
of competition with the well-managed and effi- 
cient mission schools? "What of the government 
schools for girls, which would never have been 
provided if the missionaries had not created a 
demand for female education and shown how to 
teach girls? WTiat of the native philanthropies 
which have sprung up in emulation of the mis- 
sion care for the blind, the insane, and the leper? 
What of the untraceable influence of the West- 
ern books of inspiration and learning which, but 
for the missionary translators, would not yet be 
accessible to the Chinese mind? Among Chi- 
nese who neither know nor care for the " Jesus 
religion," the changes of attitude toward opium- 
smoking, foot-binding, concubinage, slavery, 
"squeeze," torture, and the subjection of women, 
betray currents of opinion set in motion largely 
by the labors of missionaries. 

In other words, the running of so many heathen 
into our religious molds is not the chief accom- 



246 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

plislnnent. Over and above the proselytes won 
are the beneficent transformations, intellectual 
and moral, wrought in great numbers of people 
who do not affiliate with the church. Then, over 
and above such transformations of individuals 
are the transformations wrought in the society 
and government of the Middle Kingdom — better 
treatment of slaves, of prisoners, of orphans, of 
wives, of commoners. In this the missionaries 
have a great part, though no man can say how 
much. Finally, over and above the transforma- 
tions of society are the transformations wrought 
in the Chinese civilization. Here again the mis- 
sionary has planted and watered, but may not 
gather the fruits into his bin. 

The missionary thinks of himself as a bearer 
of the Gospel, not as an apostle of Western moral 
civilization at its present stage. He does not 
perceive on his nose the twentieth-century spec- 
tacles through which he reads the Gospel, and 
so determines what is " scriptural. " "On what 
ground," I asked a woman evangelist, "do you 
forbid foot-binding as 'unchristian'?" "On the 
ground that it does violence to the body God 
gave us." I thought of the choir invisible of 
fasters, flagellants, and self-mutilators acting in 
supposed obedience to the command, "If thy 
hand offend thee, cut it off," and wondered what 
they would say to such a reason. 

The missionary is the introducer of current 
Western standards. He instructs his schoolboys 
respecting bathing, spitting, the use of the hand- 



CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA 249 

kerchief, neatness of garb, the care of one's 
room, modesty in personal habits. He teaches 
the people to clean house and yard, to whitewash 
the walls of the home, to scour the floors of the 
school-room or church. He enforces the duty of 
being humane to dumb animals, of rearing de- 
fective children, of educating daughters, and con- 
sulting the wife. 

Unwittingly he reads into the Scriptures every- 
thing that has commended itself to the conscience 
of Christendom, and becomes, in spite of him- 
self, the voice of his country and his time. The 
girls' schools in the American missions reflect 
American ideas as to woman's proper place. 
The industrial schools inoculate with American be- 
lief in the dignity of manual labor a people so dis- 
dainful of toil that everyone exempt from it ad- 
vertises the fact by wearing his finger-nails long. 
The notions of government taught in the mis- 
sion colleges would have horrified those who 
Christianized the Irish and the Saxons. The 
place these same colleges give to natural science 
and scientific methods betrays the modern spirit, 
and would have scandalized St. Boniface or St. 
Francis Xavier. 

The stubborn animosity of the average treaty- 
port foreigner toward the missionaries is at first 
unaccountable. How can intelligent men consent 
to circulate such brutal falsehoods, such patent 
calumnies? For you will be told that the mis- 
sionaries speculate in land, that they trade "on 
the side," that they take it easy and live better 



250 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

than they did at home. As for their work, you 
learn that it is a failure, that the converts are 
frauds, and that the Christian Chinese is less 
honest and reliable than the heathen. Indeed, a 
local trader without twenty words of the lan- 
guage, dependent on his ''pidgin" English and 
his comprador, whose contact with the natives 
is limited to his servants and a few native mer- 
chants, will aver that the missionary, who ad- 
dresses the natives freely in their own tongue, 
comes and goes in their families, sees them off 
their guard, and counsels them in their intimate 
personal problems, "doesn't know the Chinese!" 
The British resent the outspoken hostility of 
all missionaries to the Indian opium trade. Then 
there is a belief in commercial circles that the 
opportunities and stimulus they supply cannot 
but strengthen the Chinese as competitors and 
embarrass the white man in his money-making. 
The rancor of the critics springs, however, from 
the deathless feud between the worldling and the 
idealist. Free from home restraints, many a 
merchant, shipmaster, or customs officer on the 
China coast lets himself go, and sinks into a life 
which obliges the missionaries to shun and dis- 
avow him. The sensualist, whose ruling pas- 
sions are high living, drinking, gaming, and de- 
bauchery, resents the silent reproach in the pure 
and domestic life of the missionaries, and strikes 
at them with incredible venom. I have heard 
a libertine, whose ideal vacation is an orgy in 
the yoshiwaras of Japan, rail at the missionaries 



CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA 251 

of the Lower Yangtse for gathering with their 
families during the heated term at a mountain 
resort like Kuling or Mokanshan; and this, al- 
though breakdown from overwork is far more 
frequent among them than among any other 
white men in China. 

An anti-missionary British consul in Western 
China was speaking to me of the trying climate 
of Szechuan. "It 's a shame," he said, "for a 
government or a firm to keep a white man here 
for more than three years." 

"But how about the missionaries?" I asked. 
"I understand they pass their lives here, retir- 
ing in summer no farther than the hills five miles 
away. ' ' 

"Well," he replied meditatively, "the climate 
does n't seem to hurt them. You see, they 're so 
interested in their work." 

But there are fair criticisms to be made. A 
Chinese Christian, educated in America and hold- 
ing a responsible post, told me that during the 
occupation of Peking by the Allies, when the 
local Chinese were under a reign of terror, cer- 
tain thrifty missionaries acquired large amounts 
of real estate for their missions by forcing sales. 
They would go to a householder and say, "We 
find your property is suitable for our purposes. 
Will you give us the title deed for fifty dollars ? ' ' 
The intimidated owner did not dare to refuse. 
The money was counted out to him, and he was 
notified to yield up possession in five days. Thus 
was acquired for a ridiculously low price much 



252 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

of the real estate in a certain spacious compound. 

At one time the missionaries interfered too 
freely in lawsuits between a Christian and a non- 
Christian. The convert expected aid in such 
cases, for he is apt to conceive the church as akin 
to one of his mutual-benefit associations, in which 
all stand by one another in all circumstances. 
The Roman Catholics have always been strong 
in protecting their members, and by competition 
the Protestants were drawn into a like policy. 
Of course in each case the missionary supposed 
that he was on the side of right, but often he was 
misled by ex-parte stories. As there are treaties 
guaranteeing Chinese converts against persecu- 
tion, the intervention of the missionary, with 
consuls and gunboats looming dimly behind him, 
sometimes frightened the mandarin into an un- 
fair decision. Such errors not only hurt Chris- 
tianity by outraging the popular sense of justice, 
but they attracted self-seekers into the church. 
When, after the Boxer year, the policy was 
generally abandoned by the Protestants, there 
was in some quarters a falling away. 

The question of indemnity for mission property 
destroyed by rioters is one to perplex a convoca- 
tion of saints. On the one hand, it would seem 
that, but for the dread of having to pay indem- 
nity, the ill-disposed official might withhold all 
protection and let the mob work its destructive 
will. On the other hand, in the Changsha riots 
last year, the mission property was attacked 




GO 

=H 



?H 

■43 

=1 



«4 



CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA 255 

just in order to pile up indemnities for a hated 
government to pay. The China Inland Mission, 
with its thousand missionaries, steadily refuses 
to claim indemnity, on the ground that the money 
is extracted not from guilty rioters, but from the 
innocent. Such an example of Christian for- 
bearance makes a deep impression on the Chi- 
nese and mightily advances the work of the mis- 
sion. • The results justify the policy, and no 
doubt the other missions, in order to escape in- 
vidious comparisons, will have to adopt it. 

Few of those in the field look for an early con- 
version of the Chinese. Those who have learned 
how tough and massive is the race mind expect 
that centuries will elapse before the yellow race 
will be as permeated by Christianity as the white 
race already is. They remember that "it took 
Buddhism three hundred years before it obtained 
official recognition and many centuries more be- 
fore the mass of the people were influenced by 
it." 

Nevertheless, none despond at the outlook, for 
they perceive that the aggressive rivalry of Chris- 
tianity, coupled with the coming diffusion of ed- 
ucation among the masses, is bound to raise con- 
tinually the religious plane of the Chinese oy 
forcing the native faiths to assume higher and 
higher forms in order to survive. A silent, secret 
permeation of the religions of the Far East 
by the ideals and standards of Christianity is 
inevitable; and if eventually they prove capable 



256 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

of making a stand against the invader, it will be 
owing to their heavy borrowings from it. 

Chinese Buddhism appears to be too far gone 
to be resuscitated. Debased with popular super- 
stitions and loaded down with idol-worship, even 
the missionaries sent to China by the Japanese 
Buddhists will fail to breathe into it the breath 
of life. Quite otherwise is it with Confucianism. 
It is a natural rallying-point for the patriots and 
conservatives too proud to accept a foreign re- 
ligion, and there is every prospect that for genera- 
tions it will be a center of resistance. Already 
the scholars are reading into the classics ele- 
vated moral ideas they have unconsciously im- 
bibed from Christian literature. Already there 
is a movement that calls itself "Confucio-Chris- 
tianity"! 

The doubtful attitude of the early mission- 
aries toward Confucius has given way to a cordial 
appreciation of his ideals. Confucius offers a 
faultless example of a life dominated by prin- 
ciple; Jesus offers a faultless example of a life 
dominated by love. For the people at large the 
Gospels contain far more ethical inspiration than 
the Analects; but for magistrates, judges, and 
public men, who serve their fellows by conform- 
ing to principle, the Confucian literature is full 
of uplift. 

The handicap of Confucianism, in vying with 
Christianity as a moral force, is its lack of sanc- 
tion. It presents high ideals, but there is noth- 
ing to be dreaded by one who fails to live up to 



CHEISTIANITY IN CHINA 257 

them. Hardly can it block natural inclinations 
and wrest lives from the grasp of appetite or pas- 
sion unless it develops the doctrine of responsi- 
bility to God. Such a development would hardly 
be difficult, for Confucius frequently speaks of 
"Heaven" as on the side of righteousness. 
Again, Confucianism, in competing with a re- 
ligion holding out the assurance of immortality, 
suffers from its silence as to the beyond. When 
the master was questioned on this, he replied 
evasively, "If you do not understand life, how 
can you understand death?" Very likely the 
doctrine of an after life will somehow be inter- 
preted into the classics. A Neo-Confucianism 
may thus be able to vie with Christianity for a 
long time; for, as a home-grown product, it will 
appeal strongly to the conservative instincts, 
mortified by the wholesale borrowings from West- 
ern culture that must presently be made. 

China's remoteness from our own historical 
epoch gives wings to the imagination, and the 
traveler realizes that very likely the mission- 
aries there face much the same situation that 
confronted the infant Church in the Eoman 
Empire — in both cases, temples, gods, images, 
altars, priests, sacrifices, superstition, an out- 
worn mythology, ancestor-worship, and moral 
ideals attracting only the elite. The Eoman 
Empire was superior to China in civic virtue, 
but China is superior in domestic virtue. The 
plane of culture does not appear to be very dif- 



258 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

ferent. The subjects of Shien Tung are hardly- 
more enlightened than were those of Hadrian. 
Since Christianity made its way through the Ro- 
man Empire in spite of its being spread at first 
chiefly by small tradesmen, artisans, and freed- 
men, why should it not make its way through the 
Chinese Empire! 

For when the Chinese become sensible of the 
inferiority of their own culture, Christianity 
presents itself to them clothed with prestige. It 
is communicated by picked, trained men, equal 
in character and learning to any body of apostles 
that ever carried a faith to an alien people. It 
has the prestige of impressive antiquity and of an 
immense following. Moreover, it is in close as- 
sociation with a material civilization so suc- 
cessful that China will be obliged to adopt it in 
its entirety in order to survive. 

There is no reason to believe that there is any- 
thing in the psychology or history or circum- 
stances of the Chinese to cut them off from the 
general movement of world thought. Their des- 
tiny is that of the white race; that is, to share 
in and contribute to the progress of a planetary 
culture. It therefore seems safe to predict that, 
in the end, whatever happens to Christianity in 
the West will happen to it in China. If, owing to 
the discoveries of natural science or the results 
of the higher criticism of the Scriptures, the phil- 
osophical or historical basis of Christianity is 
shattered and it loses ground in the West, 
it will not move forward in China. The in- 



CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA 259 

fluential and enlightened classes in China are 
quite too proud to allow their people to adopt 
anything cast off by the West. If, on the other 
hand, Christianity keeps its grip on the West, it 
is certain to move forward to ultimate triumph 
in China; for it is quite as congenial to the Chi- 
nese as it was to the people of the Eoman Em- 
pire in the third century. 



CHAPTER X 

THE EAR WEST OE THE FAR EAST 

A JOURNEY with Mr. Arnold, American Con- 
sul at Amoy, from Taiyuanfu, the capital of 
Shansi, southwest twelve hundred miles to Cheng- 
tu, the capital of Szechuan, in the early summer 
of 1910 enabled the writer to view a section of 
China that has been very rarely traversed and 
described by white men. The voyage down the 
Min and the Yangtse from Chengtu to Chung- 
king and thence to Ichang, the head of steam navi- 
gation, takes one through the famous gorges and 
rapids of the Yangtse, but the route has been so 
often and so well described that I will ignore that 
portion of my journey. 

For nearly three centuries the Tartar con- 
querors of China have let the splendid roads 
and canals inherited from the Ming dynasty go 
to pieces. Hence the arterial highway that binds 
Peking to the remote interior provinces is, 
through Shansi, mostly a low way. You are 
startled by seeing a man's head and shoulders 
gliding mysteriously through the wheat; draw 
nigh, and lo, a peasant riding on a cart in a 
sunken road! Often you find yourself traveling 
some yards below the level of the fields so that 
you see nothing of the country. After rains such 

260 



THE FAR WEST OF THE FAR EAST 261 

a road becomes a canal, sometimes a torrent. 
Of labor spent npon it there is no sign. When 
the Empress Dowager fled this way in 1900, 
stretches were repaired for Her Majesty which 
had not been touched since 1780! The ruts are 
never filled, save by nature. The road wanders 
whither it will and when one track becomes im- 
passable another is found. As the loess is ground 
into dust under hoof and wheel and blows away, 
the road sinks deeper and deeper until you pass 
under old gate-towers whose foundations begin 
seven feet above your head. 

For three weeks we were passing square, flat- 
top towers three miles apart along which by 
means of signal fires news of distant invasion or 
rebellion used to be flashed to the Son of Heaven. 
Now the telegraph line marches over the hills, 
and lusty saplings are rending the masonry of 
the abandoned towers. The highway is, also, an 
open air "hall of fame," being lined with monu- 
ments erected to bygone worthies by a grateful 
community. Every mile of his journey the way- 
farer who can read is reminded of the virtues 
his countrymen honor. No people has relied so 
little on police and soldiers to keep the peace as 
the Chinese and these inscriptions show how they 
have schooled themselves in morality. 

From the Peking-Hankow line a French rail- 
road climbs west half a day to Taiyuanfu. 
Thence south for two hundred miles one meets 
the produce of the country seeking this rail 
outlet to Peking and Tientsin — innumerable 



262 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

mule carts laden with flour, salt, tobacco, bean 
oil, hempen rope, paper, locust wood, licorice 
root, goat's hair, hides, and bales of cotton 
and wool. Moreover, Shansi is fat with min- 
erals which may make it a center of indus- 
trial energy after glowing Westphalia and Bel- 
gium and Pennsylvania have become a cinder. 
Once, looking down five hundred feet from the 
road, I counted in the side of a ravine seven 
veins of clear coal separated by limestone strata. 
Here and there one comes on workings where the 
natives burrow timidly into hillsides and bring 
out the coal on all fours. Near the pit good 
lump coal sells for seventy-five cents a ton, 
whereas a hundred miles away the same coal 
sells for seven times as much, showing a trans- 
port cost of four-and-a-half cents a ton-mile. A 
railroad down the valley of the Fen would cut this 
to one-tenth and put an end to twenty-five cent 
wheat and flour half a cent a pound. 

Throbbing with new life, Taiyuanfu boasts 
electricity, macadam, a uniformed street-clean- 
ing brigade, a public park with lagoon, bandstand 
and museum, a nursery growing trees for streets 
and open spaces, a match factory, a military 
school, a police force, a reformatory and a semi- 
weekly newspaper. But a couple of days south 
all traces of foreign influence vanish. Aside 
from the huge cigarette posters plastered clear 
through the province by some advertising van- 
dal, you are in the pure Middle Ages. The only 
illuminant is a twist of cotton burning in an iron 




Looking south from the Bell Tower. Sianfu 




The east gate of Taiyuaiifu, showing macadamized street 



THE FAR WEST OF THE FAR EAST 265 

cup of rape-seed oil. The windows are of thin 
paper pasted on lattice. Coined silver does not 
circulate but one carries rough lumps which the 
dealer accepts according to the verdict of his 
own scales. On converting them into coin you 
visit all the money-changers and deal with the one 
with the most liberal scales. The money of the 
country is perforated brass cash on strings, two 
hundred to the string. Ten strings are worth a 
dollar, and weigh from fifteen to twenty pounds. 
Once when, according to our contract, we paid 
each of our coolies the equivalent of forty-three 
cents, they were so loaded with what is beyond 
all question "filthy lucre" that next day they 
could hardly carry us. 

In cities like Taiku and Pingyao, as well as in 
the capital, one sees signs of the profits reaped by 
the Shansi bankers who do the principal part of 
the banking of the Empire. Fine residences with 
numerous courts, elaborate gateways, parks, lily 
ponds, stone bridges, summer houses and an- 
cestral halls, which together with stables, garden 
and orchard occupy twenty or thirty acres and are 
enclosed by high walls crowned by an ornamental 
cornice, battlements and turrets, testify to former 
prosperity. Until recently poverty was increas- 
ing owing to opium-smoking and laziness, and, in 
towns once rich, good houses were being torn down 
for the sake of the bricks. But smoking is going 
out, and the tide is turning. Gambling, however, 
is said to be extending to the business class, and 
the sons of successful Shansi bankers, giving 



266 t THE CHANGING CHINESE 

themselves up to self-indulgence, theatricals and 
poetry, let slip from them the businesses their 
fathers built up throughout the Empire. Some 
of these rich young men struck me as fat, soft 
and sensual. There is little to stimulate their 
ambition, and they see no reason why they should 
not give themselves up to the nearest pleasures. 
Zest for sports, or the ideal of bodily "fitness," 
has not yet taken hold of them. 

From the countryside at home this Shansi land- 
scape seems almost as remote as a Bedouin en- 
campment. There is never a pasture, meadow, 
hay-stack, barn or wind-mill. There are no 
painted houses, door-yards, barn-yards or grazing 
cattle. Instead of hedges or fences, open fields 
with here and there a square village girt with mud 
walls. Instead of cemeteries, clusters of graves, 
stone slabs, and brick monuments in the ancestral 
fields. For shingled frame houses, dwellings of 
sun-dried brick under tile or thatch, the larger 
enclosing a courtyard. For white church and red 
schoolhouse, temple, pagoda, and pailow. For 
finger-post, crumbling signal-towers and arched 
gateways. 

Of things outlandish and interesting there is no 
end. This is a camel country, but, as mules can- 
not abide a camel, the caravans lie up at camel 
inns through the day and travel only at night. 
We meet shaven, red-robed Buddhist monks on 
pilgrimage to the sacred mount of Wutaishan. 
They are from Szechuan, and have been two 
months on their way. All about Wensi looms are 



THE FAR WEST OF THE FAR EAST 267 

clacking in the cottages, and the town is gay with 
long strips of coarse cotton cloth, dyed the char- 
acteristic blue of work-a-day China, drying from 
ropes stretched across the street. At Paisiang a 
sudden beauty blooms in the people and for four 
days we are frequently charmed with faces of a 
Greek refinement. At Hwachow in Shensi it ab- 
ruptly comes to an end and there is nothing but 
unmitigated Mongol till we enter the streets of 
Sianfu. 

Rural police there is none, and so in the even- 
ing the irrigator carries home with him rope, 
bucket and windlass. For the same reason the 
tiny shelters of the crop watchers dot the land. 
Rows of stalks of kaoliang or corn are leaned to- 
gether and daubed with mud. This makes a 
shelter like an A tent in which at night the crop 
guard squats and from which he watches his patch 
as harvest nears. All this is a heavy tax on the 
time and sleep of the peasants. 

The valley of the lower Fen is one vast expanse 
of yellowing wheat and harvest is beginning. The 
gardens have been given their final drink, the 
threshing floors smoothed and beaten, the sickles 
ground, and the schools closed. At break of day 
the family sets forth from the village, the babies 
piled on the wheelbarrow or cart along with ket- 
tles and pots, the women riding to spare their 
squeezed feet, the boys striding alongside per- 
fectly naked and the father guiding with his whip 
the dun bullock or gray donkey that draws the 
outfit. You see them at work under their flap- 



268 .THE CHANGING CHINESE 

ping straw hats, reaping with sickle or cradle, 
and taking as long to bind one sheaf as I need to 
bind five. They indulge in a long siesta through 
the midday heat and in the cool of the evening 
ride home on sheaves piled onto the cart with 
forks from locust branches that have been trained 
to grow three tines from one point. Poor 
widows and naked orphans glean about in the 
stubble and follow the homing cart to gather the 
heads of wheat shaken from the load. 

It is harvesting as simple and idyllic as that 
of classical antiquity, and would have the charm 
of the old Greek life if only the maidens were as 
free as those of Homer's time. But by "pro- 
priety" the marriageable girls are excluded from 
this cheerful harvest-home and must stifle in the 
tiny close chambers of their low houses while the 
youths sing amid the sheaves. 

The wheat is strewed about the threshing floor 
and near midday when it has grown brittle in the 
sunshine they beat it with flails or make a donkey 
draw a stone roller round and round over it. 
Then the straw is lifted aside, the mingled grain 
and chaff swept into a heap and the picturesque 
winnowing begins. Always the wheat has the 
right of way. People flail out their sheaves on 
the road because it saves making a threshing floor 
and I have seen half the width of a sixteen-foot 
main street in a great city occupied by some- 
body's drying wheat. The traffic squeezed by 
and nobody protested against the encroachment. 

Nowhere is the havoc wrought by deforesta- 




CO g 




THE FAE WEST OF THE FAE EAST 271 

tion more evident than in Northwest China. 
Around Taiyuanfu all the once-wooded moun- 
tains are bare and bone dry. Down through the 
province one sees no trees on mountain or foot- 
hill save those about temples. The original hard 
woods are all gone, so in the valley one grows 
cheap soft woods, — poplar, cottonwood, basswood, 
box-elder and willow. 

Once the tree cover is removed, the rains wash 
the soil from the hillsides and with it fill the water- 
courses and choke the valleys. Wherever a 
brook or a creek debouches into the valley of the 
Fen it has built with this wash a great alluvial 
cone, curving down-river, and along the crest of 
this cone runs the shallow gravelly bed of the 
stream that once loitered under high banks three 
or four fathoms beneath its present level. This 
cone has covered under silt and sand and gravel 
from a few score acres to several square miles of 
the former rich bottom lands and they can never 
be recovered. 

Buildings are imbedded to the waist in the 
debris. Gateways that once one could ride a 
camel through one can now only creep through 
on hands and knees. Twice we came upon ma- 
jestic stone bridges which once spanned broad 
affluents of the Fen, but which now, their noble 
arches half silted up, stand unused amid fields 
of beans and rape, sad monuments of a bygone 
prosperity. Since the bridge was built twenty feet 
of wash from deforested hills has been dropped 
in that watercourse and the stream no longer 



272 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

fed from spongy wooded slopes is a trickle or an 
underground moisture in summer and a raging 
flood in the rainy season. 

With the woods vanishes much that makes life 
worth living. The brooks no longer run clear 
water filtered through moss and humus but are 
turbid with the soil of the bared slopes. Fish 
will not live in them, and bathing ceases to be a 
joy. In twelve days of Shansi travel I never saw 
a boy disporting himself in water. The springs 
dry up and no late-summer pastures are fresh- 
ened by the seepage from wooded hillsides. Dis- 
mally the muddy streams wander in the sun over 
wide shallows instead of lurking as of yore in 
deep channels under shading banks. No fallen 
tree or log jam checks the creek and offers an Au- 
gust lurking pool for the trout. No leafy path or 
mossy log invites lovers, though, to be sure, 
China does not believe in lovers. Millions live 
life through without knowing sylvan glades, 
"green-robed senators of the mighty woods," 
the glories of October leaves or the boyhood 
pleasures of nutting, bird-nesting, and squirrel- 
hunting. 

Roots, twigs, grass, straw and dung replace fire- 
wood. Brick or mud is the sole building material. 
Brick benches and tables replace wooden furni- 
ture ; brick stoops, wooden porches ; and the high- 
way stretches glaring hot and dusty to where the 
lone locust by the tea house offers a patch of 
shade. Thus, with the woods vanish most of the 
sources of beauty, the founts of poetry and in- 



THE FAR WEST OF THE FAR EAST 273 

spiration dry up, and life sinks to a dull sordid 
round of food-getting and begetting. 

The most penetrative Western things in China 
are the Gospel, kerosene, and cigarettes, and I 
am glad that as between light, heat and smoke, 
the prophets of light get into the country first. 
These interior folk gather their first impres- 
sions of our race from those who want to make 
converts rather than those who want to make 
money. They take all foreigners for mission- 
aries and often were we greeted with "Ping an," 
"Ping an" (Peace be unto you), the salutation 
with which they are in the habit of greeting mem- 
bers of the mission. The inland missionaries 
freqently garb themselves a la Chinoise in order 
to get closer to the people. They do not feel it 
to be a hardship, however, for, in comparison 
with the practical Chinese costume, the cut of 
Western dress is about as foolish as anything 
you find in China. Some go so far as to grow 
a queue, and when you meet a Scotchman with a 
bright auburn pig-tail down his back you have 
seen something memorable. 

Missionary life here is no junket. I met one 

young man of noble face whose sweetheart had 

died of typhus a month before on the very day 

set for their wedding. Neither this shock nor a 

year's suffering from sprue, which one gets by 

"living Chinese" and sitting at the table of one's 

humble converts, had taken from his countenance 

its serene, uplifted look. 

Cut off from kindred, society, music, art, 
13 



274 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

amusement and intellectual companionship, the 
missionary makes of Eis house a little reteat full 
of reminders and suggestions of the motherland. 
The missionary home is a green oasis in a Sahara 
of dirt and ugliness. Surrounded by so much that 
is distressing these exiles have to live much in the 
spirit. If they devour endless devotional litera- 
ture and sing many hymns and hang fortifying 
texts on their walls, it is not at all from unwhole- 
some excess of piety but to find solace from the 
depressing spectacle of a fine people doomed to 
a dreary existence which cannot be much relieved 
in our time. 

Once we met a wayfarer with a singularly noble 
countenance, who put his bundle down and made 
us a profound salutation. The Consul conversed 
with him and after he had passed I asked, "Who 
is that man? He is one of the finest-looking 
Chinese I have ever seen." It came out that he 
was the pastor of a native church. I have not 
the language to describe what happiness and en- 
couragement these souls of higher aspiration 
among the Chinese gain from their fellowship 
with the kindred spirits from the West. 

While some complain that the missionaries live 
too well, I have heard the China-Inland mission- 
aries blamed for undertaking to live on too lit- 
tle — in some cases not more than a hundred dol- 
lars a year. In the field, however, you realize 
that the mission well knows what it is doing. In 
Hwachow, Shansi, you can get nine eggs for a cent, 
a pigeon for a cent, a fowl for five cents, a brace 



THE FAR WEST OF THE FAR EAST 275 

of pheasants for three cents, mutton without 
bone for three or four cents a pound. For a cost 
of sixty cents a week apiece, the ladies of the 
mission can set their table with the best the 
market affords. 

These ladies, by the way, are English and kins- 
women of a gallant British general. They con- 
duct a self-supporting school with more than a 
hundred girls and live by themselves with not a 
white man within a day's journey. One of these 
sisters is a survivor of the Boxer year. Then 
she saw her pupils ravished and murdered and 
her school given to the flames. For weeks she 
was taken about in chains, lodged in the vilest 
dungeons and, time and again, the knife of a 
Boxer was at her throat. Yet she is back in her 
work at the old station, quite unconscious of her 
heroism. 

After a fortnight of mule litter we sight an- 
cient yellow Sianfu, "the Western capital," with 
its third of a million souls. Within the fortified 
triple gate the facial mold abruptly changes and 
the refined intellectual type appears. Here and 
there faces of a Hellenic purity of feature are 
seen and beautiful children are not uncommon. 
These Chinese cities make one realize how the 
cream of the population gathers in the urban 
centers. Everywhere town opportunities have 
been a magnet for the elite of the open country. 

Cinctured with twelve miles of lofty wall dating 
from the fourteenth century and in perfect re- 
pair, Sianfu, more than any other city, recalls 



276 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

the early history of the "black-haired people" 
from the "West who from this "Wei valley carried 
their torch of civilization to the rude peoples of 
what is now China. Here indeed is the cradle 
of the Empire. Ages before Peking was or 
Canton, Sianfu was the central hearth of Chi- 
nese culture. No other city has been the capital 
for so long. Off and on it held the scepter for 
twenty-three centuries. From the battlements 
you see out across the plain huge tumuli shelter- 
ing the dust of monarchs who reigned before King 
Solomon. One commemorates the father of the 
execrated emperor who, not long after Alexander 
the Great, sought to break the sway of the past 
by burning the ancient books and slaying the 
literati. 

There is in China no museum of antiquities to 
match the Pei-lin or Forest of Tablets, a collec- 
tion of more than fourteen hundred historical 
records in stone running back twelve centuries. 
The pride of the collection is the famous Nes- 
torian Stone inscribed in 781, which gives a long 
account of the Nestorian Christianity which, after 
nourishing for two centuries, was stamped out 
by persecution a thousand years ago. How 
odd that the Cross was carried to China before 
it reached the Great Britain whose sons are now 
carrying it to the Chinese again ! 

The Mohammedans have many mosques here 
and from time to time of late the new self-con- 
scious aggressive Islam sends out some zealot 
from Constantinople to warm them in the faith. 




The type of public monument 
universal in Shansi 



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Grave-stones, Chihli 



THE FAE WEST OF THE FAR EAST 279 

Local Buddhism just now is under a cloud owing 
to a story that has the tang of the European 
Dark Ages. Not long ago a wicked monk in a 
Buddhist monastery here became obnoxious to 
his fellows and in solemn conclave, the abbot ap- 
proving, they decided he was not fit to live. So 
they stuffed him alive into their furnace. The 
missionaries report that many from the intel- 
lectual class now listen to the preaching in the 
central hall and after his sermon the preacher 
is well heckled with shrewd questions. "Do send 
out strong men!" was the parting word of a 
leading missionry; "We need all the equipment 
we can get to answer the questions the thinking 
men of China are asking." Naturally the spur 
of competition is putting new zeal into the friends 
of the old faith. The Confucians have banded 
together and are sending out wandering gospel- 
lers of their own to preach the doctrines of the 
Sage at fairs and other popular gatherings. 
And that is something worth while. Whatever 
their proselyting success the missionaries do suc- 
ceed in turning men's thoughts to the things of 
the spirit. 

Sianfu has a match factory, and the half-dozen 
shops carrying foreign goods show that the Chi- 
nese are buying patent medicines, tooth brushes, 
cosmetics, liqueurs, cigarettes, condensed milk, 
underwear, lamps, clocks, spectacles, penknives, 
and athletic goods. American kerosene sells for 
forty-three cents a gallon, but at Yenchuan in the 
north of the province, where there is an inex- 



280 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

haustible supply of petroleum, a uative refinery 
is producing kerosene which, after two hundred 
miles of cart carriage, sells here for thirty-one 
cents. 

When, in the days of Cromwell, the Manchu 
Tartars overpowered China, they placed Tartar 
garrisons in the chief cities. These "banner- 
men," living a privileged caste in their own 
fortified quarter and fed by government rice, 
have vegetated and multiplied for generations. 
In Sianfu the Tartar quarter is a dismal picture 
of crumbling walls, decay, indolence and squalor. 
On the big drill grounds you see the runways 
along which the horseman gallops and shoots ar- 
rows at a target while the Tartar military man- 
darins look on. These lazy bannermen were 
tried in the new army but proved flabby and 
good-for-nothing; they would break down on an 
ordinary twenty-mile march. Battening on their 
hereditary pensions they have given themselves 
up to sloth and vice, and their poor chest de- 
velopment, small weak muscles, and diminishing 
families foreshadow the early dying out of the 
stock. Where is there a better illustration of 
the truth that parasitism leads to degeneration! 

The hope is in the new national army, and this 
is one of its important recruiting centers, for the 
Mohammedans of this province and Kansuh, 
sprung in part from West Asian warriors, are 
far more spirited and pugnacious than the pure 
Chinese. There is a military preparatory school 
here with two hundred students, and buildings 



THE FAB WEST OF THE FAE EAST 281 

are arising for what is to be one of the four 
chief military schools of the Empire. In all the 
public schools there is daily military drill. 

Feeling the closing jaws of the vise, i. e., the 
Powers, Chinese patriots are making the army 
the national pet in order to raise the despised 
calling of the soldier. Patriotic societies as- 
semble the people and appeal to scholars and 
other better elements to enlist. The students are 
stirring up an agitation for the establishment of 
a volunteer army. In some parts of the Empire, 
especially in the provinces near to Peking, good 
men are sought for the ranks, they are promptly 
paid, and they are taught to make themselves 
trig and neat. The men are proud of the uni- 
form and the public is being taught to respect 
it. When traveling, soldiers are no longer 
herded in open trucks, but ride third-class. The 
military ranks have been raised above the cor- 
responding civil ranks. The officers are prod- 
ucts of military schools not, as formerly, prize 
essayists. Princes of the Blood hold high com- 
mands and constantly wear their uniforms. The 
infant Emperor has conferred upon the army the 
supreme distinction of announcing himself as its 
commander-in-chief. 

Nevertheless, each province does pretty much 
as it pleases, uniforms and equipments are not 
yet standardized, and at least fifteen distinct 
types of rifles are in use. Often the central 
military authorities show an astonishing lack of 
snap and efficiency. For example, they allow 



282 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

the testing of a foreign machine to train the men 
to accurate shooting to be interrupted for the 
hundred days of mourning after the late Em- 
peror's death and again for five weeks at the 
Chinese New Year. The following incident re- 
veals the old listlessness in quarters where the 
professional spirit ought to be at its keenest. 
An American captain happened to show certain 
Chinese officers at Peking a Browning revolver 
which so pleased them that they inquired how 
they, could obtain such a weapon. He volun- 
teered to get them and presently orders for two 
hundred were taken, mostly among officers of the 
Imperial Guard. Since a government permit 
(hu-chao) is necessary if you want to bring arms 
into Cathay, the captain suggested to the officers 
that of course they would procure the indispensa- 
ble hu-chao. They said, "Oh, you get it," and 
as he would not beseech the Chinese Government 
for permission to import arms for its own de- 
fenders, the revolvers never came. 

All the four days to Fengsiangfu the road was 
lined with reapers returning home to Kansuh. 
At dawn they would be lying thick by the road- 
side asleep, and a little later they would be crowd- 
ing the eating stalls where our chair coolies rest 
and smoke after three miles of carry. Here a 
cent buys a big bowl of noodle soup or wheat 
porridge with a large steamed roll and a sugared 
doughnut, so the strings of hard-earned cash 
tied about their waist suffered little. Each 
carried pipe and tobacco pouch and on 






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THE FAR WEST OF THE FAR EAST 285 

his back a light frame holding his raw felt 
coat, sleeping mat, cooking pot, sickle, and per- 
haps some town wares to peddle among his 
shepherd neighbors. While the harvest is on, 
hundreds of these cutters are to be seen at day- 
break in the village streets waiting to be hired. 
When the cutting is over they work their way 
four or five hundred miles back home in time to 
reap the late crops of cool Kansuh. 

Such verdant, uncouth, staring, gaping, ill- 
smelling, garlicky hinds might have been seen in 
Europe as late as the Crusades, but hardly since 
then. It was such unlettered boors, no doubt, 
who, in the later Roman Empire, by clinging to 
the old religion long after the cities had accepted 
the new, made the word for villager, pagan, and 
for heath dweller, heathen, synonymous with 
"non-Christian." What irony that to-day the 
polished Confucian gentleman of the cities is 
called a "heathen"! 

Thanks to rebellion and famine Shensi is now 
roomy and its people do not have to work very 
hard. There is little murder of girl babies,' 
though, to be sure, opium pellets come in very 
handy for such purpose. Shensi folk migrate 
little, live much to themselves, and are rude, con- 
servative and provincial. I heard of a peasant 
woman refusing a thousand cash rather than 
bother to boil a pot of water for a traveler's tea 
— which is as if one of our farmers' wives should 
refuse a five-dollar bill for such service. 

At Fengsiangfu we bade good-bye to the road 



286 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

which, leads on to Turkestan, to Cashgar and, if 
you like, to "silken Samarcand." It is a cart 
road to Lanchowfu where the Yellow Eiver is 
so swift that a ferryboat rowing hard to get 
across is swept ten miles down stream ere it 
touches the other bank. Eecently the governor 
there had an American engineer built a truss 
bridge across the river, and when it was opened 
the canny Mongol carters — who know about stone 
bridges but not about steel — halted their loads 
on the approach and went on ahead to inspect the 
structure and see whether it really would stand 
up under a cart ! 

Chinese townspeople do not always cut loose 
from agriculture. In this city trade has been 
dead for three weeks because so many of the 
townsmen have been away harvesting their wheat. 
The city has a progressive prefect from Szechuan, 
the Massachusetts of West China, who has es- 
tablished a school for silk culture, introduced the 
mulberry, and hopes that silk-raising will take 
the place of the doomed poppy. 

From here we leave wheel track and strike 
south in sedan chairs to struggle for twelve days 
with the mountains that give the province a name 
which means "the western passes." The scen- 
ery was once Tyrolean, but Nature has been 
tamed by man and forced to yield him the ut- 
most of subsistence. Woods, brake, grass, pas- 
ture, wild shubbery — nearly everything in the 
nature of wilderness — vanished centuries ago. 



THE FAR WEST OF THE FAR EAST 287 

Utility reigns supreme; and all it comes to is to 
feed a dirty, sordid, opium-sodden people living 
in hovels, wearing coarse, faded blue garments, 
crippling their women by foot-binding, and let- 
ting their boys and girls run about filthy and 
naked! No music, art, books, poetry, worship, 
refined association, allure of children, charm of 
women or glory of young manhood in its 
strength. No discussions, no politics, no heed to 
events in the great world. Life on a low plane, 
the prey of petty cares and mean anxieties. 
Infinite diligence, great cleverness and ingenuity, 
abundance of foresight and thrift, few destruc- 
tive passions; still, a life that is dreary and de- 
pressing to look upon. And the thing that hath 
been will be unless new stimuli and higher ideals 
come in from without. These people pay a 
heavy price for having crushed woman down into 
a mere breeder of children. Of the charm, the 
surprise, the refinement woman can impart to 
life if only she is granted freedom and opportu- 
nity, they have no inkling. 

Family meals there are none; armed with 
a pair of chopsticks each stows his food when he 
feels like it. The windows are few, small and ob- 
structed with lattice or oiled paper so that, thanks 
to the doctrine that "the home is woman's 
sphere," she passes her days in the semi-dark- 
ness of a cave. Almost never does one meet a 
woman traveling. The females of the common 
people are rarely out of sight of home. But as 



288 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

officials liave to take their families about from 
post to post, we pass perhaps three women a day 
always in curtained sedan chairs. 

The Celestials let their girlhood bloom un- 
noticed in a cellar and cannot divine the charm 
we Americans find in these graceful budding 
creatures with their innocent and precious af- 
firmance of the worth of life. I first realized 
what the East misses by my delight when, on 
my return, I saw girls and young women at the 
stations along the Canadian Pacific Eailway con- 
ducting themselves like natural, uncowed human 
beings. Their freedom had the witchery of a 
guarded park where the fawns face you fearlessly 
in the open and the timid quail run about un- 
afraid. 

As we go south signs of superstition multiply. 
Just inside the town gate stands often a dingy 
little god-house with a horrid idol clutching a 
human head or eye-ball in his hand. There are 
many wayside shrines containing little figures 
of an old king and his consort, seated and benign, 
genii loci no doubt. Before some jutting stone 
by the path under the cliff the incense curls all 
day long and the passing packman pauses long 
enough to buy a few sticks which the priest, with 
profound kotows to the smoky stone stuck up 
with cock feathers, will burn under the nose of 
the imaginary joss. We met a procession of 
mourners chanting a weird dirge and on the cof- 
fin they bore on their shoulders crouched a cock 
to be sacrificed at the grave. Along the Kialing 



THE FAE WEST OF THE FAR EAST 289 

one finds facing each turn in the river a square 
stone pillar bearing a man's bust. The Romans 
called such termini. Now, why should the carven 
head on these Szechuan termini have short curling 
hair and a Roman cast of features? On this 
same river we pass a great rock face known as the 
Cliff of the Thousand Gods. Buddhist piety has 
pitted it with many hundreds of niches each hold- 
ing the image of some god or saint, life size or 
greater. 

Where the road crosses a high divide a wall 
pierced by a gateway spans the pass and the 
traveler catches his first sight of the canon beyond 
as a lovely picture framed in an arch. Temples 
crown such places and I have seen the roadway 
for a furlong literally lined with inscribed stone 
tablets presented by worshipers who wished to 
commemorate their visit to the holy place. A 
silk-peddler from far Chefoo was with us when 
we passed and for good luck he had the priests 
light joss-sticks for him in front of the god. He 
was most perfunctory and no thought of prayer 
as communion with the deity had ever entered 
his mind. His idea was; you do something nice, 
such as burn incense, for the god and he, seeing 
he is a gentleman, will do something nice for you. 

Nevertheless, the priests do protect the trees. 
On the deforested mountains you can tell a tem- 
ple fifteen miles away by the clump of trees 
about it, which stand out on the sharp sky line 
with great distinctness. Sometimes many acres 
of ancient woods are in the sacred grove and once 



290 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

for two days our way was dominated by a high 
pine-clad peak with a protecting monastery 
perched on top. 

Daring and costly as was this "Koad of the 
Golden Ox" it is, like everything else in this land, 
neglected. Often we came on a piece of road 
that had dropped away or been buried by an 
earth-slip or undermined by the river ; but repair 
work there is none. In forty days of travel we 
beheld never a stroke of road-mending. The 
laden coolies painfully pick their way around the 
break and traffic flows on. We saw fine stone 
bridges building, for you can carve your name 
on a bridge and, besides, a grateful community 
may raise a tablet in your honor. Indeed, if 
prefect or philanthropist Tsu builds an entire 
highway, it will be known as the "Tsu road" and 
he will be happy. But what glory is there for 
any one in keeping up the existing highways? 
So old main roads and bridges are suffered to 
drop to pieces at the very moment new lesser 
ones are being built. "What China needs is a 
highway superintendent in each prefecture who 
will organize a permanent road-mending force. 
Let him be an expert, making roads his life work 
and joy, not an ambitious official on his way up 
the ladder of promotion with his eye fixed on the 
rungs above him. 

Frequently for a furlong on each side of the 
village the paving of the road is missing. I dis- 
covered at last that the villagers had simply dug 
up the paving stones and used them to build 




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THE FAE WEST OF THE FAE EAST 293 

their pig pens or garden walls. Thanks to these 
depredations, each year a hundred thousand car- 
riers go slipping and laboring miserably through 
these stretches of muck. Yet nothing is done ; the 
private interest is sacred and must be given 
the right of way no matter what the damage to 
the general public. For in Chinese eyes the 
private right is something distinct and clear-cut 
which each understands and sympathizes with, 
while the public right is not vizualized at all or, 
in any case, commands no sympathy. If my 
next-door neighbor has a dramatic troupe per- 
form in front of his house making the night 
clamorous with gongs and songs, I do not pro- 
test. It is all his affair. The whole neighbor- 
hood tolerates the murder of its sleep because 
each imagines that sometime, perhaps, he will 
want to have a festivity in front of Ms house! 

Throughout our journey the attitude of the 
people left nothing to be desired. Once only did 
we hear the epithet "foreign devil" and that 
was the innocent prattle of an urchin. We 
found mission ladies who had heard it but once 
in seven years. These ladies occupy stations by 
themselves, go chairing about the country alone, 
and are never molested or even insulted. They 
feel perfectly safe with any chairmen they pick 
up. The other side is the spectacle of evil- 
doers slowing dying in the open street in the ter- 
rible "standing frame" where, with his arms 
pinioned, a criminal hangs by his head in a frame 
that just lets his toes reach the ground. It is 



294 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

blood-curdling when yon meet a party carrying 
a man with fettered ankles seated in a big 
wooden cage to reflect that he may be on his way 
to the headsman's sword, the standing frame, 
or death-by-the-thonsand-cuts. 

The giant tangle of monntains through which 
one emerges into the valley of the Upper Han, a 
thousand miles by river from Hankow, i. e., 
Han-mouth, seems to be a social frontier. North 
of this axis all the way to Peking people live in 
walled villages ; south of it they live in scattered 
homesteads. Apparently the easily defended 
passes relieved the people to the south from fear 
of the Mongols. These people, moreover, do 
not bind the feet of the women so tightly nor 
do they keep them so secluded. The girls were 
everywhere helping thresh the wheat and a single 
family would be able to have from five to eight 
flails going on the threshing floor. 

The real line of cleavage between North China 
and South China comes a little further on where 
rice culture begins. For with rice the water 
buffalo becomes the principal farm animal. But 
if the horse or mule cannot be used in farming, 
one cannot afford to keep him merely for trans- 
port. So there is an end of wheeled vehicles, 
the narrow, stone-paved road replaces the broad 
dirt road of North China, the coolie becomes the 
common carrier, and the highway is thickly 
studded with refreshment stalls for the human 
pack animals. One travels by chair and no 
longer by mule litter. The inns are for men 



THE FAR WEST OF THE FAR EAST 295 

rather than for beasts. Since the streets of the 
cities are continuous with the country roads and 
a part of the same system of communication, they 
become narrow in the same degree as the high- 
ways. As neither sun nor wind can get at these 
straitened streets to dry them, they become foul 
and unsanitary. Population is more congested 
than in the north. Mosquitoes bred in the paddy 
fields make life a torment. In the wheat belt the 
contents of the family cess-pool are mixed with 
dry earth and applied without offense. With the 
cultivation of rice you get the liquid manure, the 
filth bucket, and the awful stenches characteristic 
of the South. So that the oft-noted contrasts 
between the life of North China and that of South 
China derive not from a difference in the peo- 
ple, but from the demands of the dominant crop. 
Wonderful is the high broken land south of the 
mountain masses that constitutes the great 
sponge of China. Rounding the shoulder of a 
height, you see mountains rising behind moun- 
tains until the distant purple ranges are lost in 
perpetual cloud. At intervals a great shadow- 
filled cleft opens to the south whence issues a 
snow-fed river into an amphitheater of terraced 
foothills covered to the top with rice fields, each 
overflowing into the one next below. The gleam 
near the crown of a hill is the storage pool that 
gives the rice to drink. Then the river meanders 
about a widening valley floor and finally for 
half a hundred miles between the foothills you 
glimpse its silver on its way to the Yangtse. One 
14 



296 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

sees rivers with other rivers flowing into them 
and smaller rivers flowing into these, each loiter- 
ing through its enameled valley. The recesses 
of a kingdom lie open in the afternoon sunlight. 
One looks down, as might the Heavenly Eye, on 
the habitations of countless beings and in im- 
agination sees them hurrying about their petty 
food-winning tasks like so many agitated ants. 

There are two ways of traversing broken 
country. Follow the water courses, now and then 
climbing over a ridge into the next valley ; or fol- 
low the water partings, now and then dropping 
down into a valley in order to reach the next ridge. 
Local roads follow the valley route where the 
people are thickest; but a government way may 
take the high route that gives you dry road, 
breeze and a magnificent view on either hand. 
Now, the road that leads from the foot of the 
passes two hundred-odd miles southwest to 
Chengtu mounts three thousand feet above the 
Kialing and then keeps just as high as it can. 
Save where it dips into a valley it is lined with 
splendid old cedars, some not less than seven feet 
through, each protected by its wooden tablet 
warning against vandalism. 

Through the mountains mule and man vie as 
carriers. A great quantity of cotton has to be 
transported from the Wei Basin two hundred and 
fifty miles to the Han Valley, and for these bulky 
bales the man is better. We passed thousands 
of coolies creeping along under their huge white 
burdens like migrating ants under their eggs, 



THE FAR WEST OF THE FAR EAST 297 

carrying from one to two hundred pounds of 
cotton eight to fifteen miles a day and earning 
therefor about seven cents. 

As we descend into overpeopled Szechuan, the 
pack mules vanish and the highway is given up 
to the packmen. One backs his towering load 
and carries a little iron-shod T prop to put be- 
hind him and rest his load on when he takes 
breath. Another swings his bales from the ends 
of a six-foot bamboo balanced across his shoulder 
on a pad. Every two minutes he must shift pole 
to the other shoulder. The early beginner grows 
his own pad in the shape of two huge red-blue cal- 
louses on either side of the base of the neck. 

Each carries cash, sweat rag, fan, water pipe, 
oiled paper umbrella and a roll of matting to keep 
his load dry. The pack mule requires an at- 
tendant to guide, drive, load, unload, feed and 
collect pay for him. The packman looks after 
himself and in a fortnight or a month, this slave 
of poverty delivers his load to the consignee, 
takes his wage and departs. What can a poor 
mule do? Such competition simply takes the 
fodder out of his mouth! 

But oh, the physique of these packmen ! Naked 
to the middle, they present a superb torso, the 
muscles of the trunk being developed to perfec- 
tion under the carrying pole. Never a hollow 
waist, never a protruding abdomen. There is 
not an ounce of clogging fat and the play of the 
well-defined muscles under the clear bronze skin 
is beautiful to behold. It is a pity that the 



298 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

moment the Szechuanese is exempt from phys- 
ical labor, he begins to degenerate for his ideal 
is to become as unlike the despised coolie as pos- 
sible. If he is a prosperous merchant he is proud 
of his thickening jowl and his sagging waist. If 
he is of the literati he is proud of his slim hands 
and his lissome figure. 

In Szechuan the Mongol strain weakens and 
you come upon fine human types. I saw a strip- 
ling who might have posed for Michael Angelo's 
David. Often the eye lights on an oval face with 
arching penciled eyebrows, delicate temples, 
straight nose, high-cut nostrils and fine eyes, 
beautiful as Antinous. The world has been slow 
to realize that nowhere is there a more high-bred 
countenance than you can find in China. Its 
beauty has been veiled by the unbecoming prac- 
tice of shaving the front of the head, which 
"brings out" the cranium too much and suggests 
a precocious baldness. When the queue is gone, 
— and it seems in the way of going — our painters 
will find a fresh inspiration in the Endymions 
and Ganymedes of Szechuan. 

But while the stock is good, its condition is not. 
The wens, tumors, swellings, wastings, eruptions, 
sores and ulcers that meet the eye are fairly 
sickening. No doubt if we went about stripped 
to the waist, there would be shocking revela- 
tions. There would be a dreadful accumulation 
of blemishes, too, if a generation of us grew up 
without doctor or surgeon. Still, the marred 
and rotting bodies so common in certain foul 




Noontide in a street of Paisiang 




In the valley of the Wei 



THE FAR WEST OF THE FAE EAST 301 

old towns suggest syphilitic taint or univer- 
sal poisoning. When the flesh of scavengers is 
food, when walls, floors, furniture, garments, and 
the water in which they are washed swarm with 
microbes, when one cannot eat or drink or breathe 
or stir or bathe without risk of infection, even 
the hardy constitution of the Chinese succumbs. 
It is a mercy that the hot-drink habit gives 
the people here at least the benefit of boiled 
water. 

In teeming Szechuan the food quest is dire, un- 
remitting and obvious. The country is weedless, 
tilled like a garden, but coarse utility and anxious 
calculation look out of it everywhere. No lawns, 
shade trees, flowers or shrubbery. Not even an 
orchard, vineyard, or orange-grove; but every- 
where rice, pulse, cabbages, corn and beans — the 
maximum of sustenance! Passing a farmhouse 
you glimpse dirty naked babies, listless foot- 
bound women, feculent floors, sooty walls, dark 
rooms, rooting pigs, a mangy cur, a festering 
cess-pool, a couple of bushels of wheat drying on 
a mat, a woman or a donkey grinding at a mill. 
No newspapers, no courting, no social gather- 
ings, no uplifting religion, nothing that gives out- 
look, aspiration, hope. In six weeks I saw but 
one man reading, and he had fallen asleep over 
his book. The faces of the boys of eight to 
twelve years are most appealing; they look 
brighter than white children of the same age. It 
is sad to reflect that in the absence of good public 
schools and economic opportunity they can but 



302 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

grow up into the same ignorant, superstitious, 
overworked men their fathers are. 

After a week along the sky line we drop down 
at last into the world-famous Chengtu plain, 
really an old lake about seventy miles by thirty 
which has been filled with the silt gnawed from the 
great Thibetan mountains by the foamy Min. 
Two thousand years ago the engineer Li Ping 
— since exalted to godhead and honored in many 
temples — caught and split and tamed the Min 
where it issues from the gorges, so that its still- 
cold, milky water, strained through a thousand 
interlacing canals, flashes and rustles and gur- 
gles down this "Garden of the Flowery Eealm" 
under apricot and pomegranate, past copses of 
mulberry and bamboo, irrigating crops that feed 
three or four thousand to the square mile. The 
plain is rich but most of the people are poor, for 
there are at least four millions of them, and if 
the soil were twice as bountiful there would be 
twice as many people just as poor. Nowhere on 
the globe, I suppose, is so much food coaxed from 
so little soil. One hears of seven crops a sea- 
son. You easily toss a stone across the plot that 
must feed a human being a year. In their eager- 
ness to accumulate fertilizer the farmers have 
lined the thronged highways with screened pits 
which emit unspeakable stenches. 

Most of the crops the Min water reaches by 
gravity, but to the higher tracts it is lifted by 
huge wheels built of bamboo but as spidery as a 
Ferris wheel. Set upright in a ditch they turn 



THE FAR WEST OF THE FAE EAST 303 

slowly as the swift current beats on the little 
square mats fixed all around the rim. Between 
the mats bamboo-joint buckets as big as your 
forearm are fastened at such an angle that they 
fill while in the water and spill their contents side- 
ways into a long trough as they come to the top 
of the wheel. By this means these clever culti- 
vators have made the current lift a part of itself 
thirty-five feet. 

On account of the many streams, one meets 
with innumerable bridges, many of them of stone 
and very beautiful. Always in the big bridges 
a carved dragon's head projects upstream from 
each pier and on the down-stream side the 
dragon's lashing tail is seen. "Where wheel 
traffic is unknown it is possible to introduce the 
elegant "camel-back" bridge, a single high stone 
arch over which the road is carried by steps. 

At Chengtu, capital of Szechuan and one of the 
wealthiest and best-built cities of the Empire, 
Western influence is seen at its best. When the 
Viceroy Chao-Erh-Sen took us to the roof of the 
military college and pointed out the numerous 
schools and public buildings, he showed a just 
pride in what is, no doubt, the most progressive 
of pure Chinese cities. No other can match the 
paving, the cleansing, the policing of the streets 
of Chengtu. City water and electric light will 
soon be in. Here two thousand miles from the 
ocean and within two hundred miles of Thibet as 
the crow flies, the Chinese are doing better than 
in the coast cities that have had intercourse with 



304 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

the "West for two generations. If may be in the 
character of the people, for after devastation the 
province was resettled in the seventeenth century 
by pushful immigrants from other provinces. It 
may be the exemption of Szechuan from the 
ravages of the Taiping rebellion. It may be, 
also, that these remote Chinese, free from the im- 
pressions left by the forced opium trade, treaty- 
port contempt, gun-boat diplomacy, and the West- 
ern mailed fist, are in a better mood to appreciate 
the higher side of the West — its ideas and ideals. 

I say "ideals" advisedly, for not Western 
wares, nor Western methods and machinery, nor 
even Western science and technology suffice, 
even together, to meet the needs of this people. 
Their fires are banked and we shall never know 
what they can do till the dampers of their energy 
are opened. 

Chinese children do not run, romp, and climb 
like ours. Their schoolboys are less riotous 
than white boys. Athletic sports are unknown. 
One recreates with kite flying, cricket fighting, 
gambling, chess, or letting off fire-crackers. To 
sip wine and cap verses in a shady arbor or a 
cool grotto by a lotus pond is a gentleman's ideal 
of happiness. There is game aplenty in some 
parts, but no one shoots save the pot hunter with 
his rusty matchlock. No one bestrides a horse 
for pleasure. The placid mule is preferred to 
the horse and a gentle amble to a brisk gallop. 
When the mounted soldier gets up speed, the 
sight is a salve for sore eyes. Boxing would 




A horseshoe tomb in a South China hillside 




Coffins in rest-house waiting for the lucky day 



, 



THE FAE WEST OF THE FAE EAST 307 

never occur to anyone as a sport. Fighting is 
rare and, far from being a manly exchange of 
blows, is waged girlwise, with scratching and 
hair-pulling. The singing of the men is a nasal 
falsetto in strange contrast to the abdominal 
bellow of Western males. 

Walking is demeaning, and one never goes 
afoot if he has the price of a sedan chair. His 
outlay is a sacrifice to his sense of dignity rather 
than to his laziness. Promoted to be a "boy" 
even the hardy coolie behaves as if stricken with 
locomotor ataxia, and will be chaired. To pay 
a social call save in a chair is gross discourtesy. 
Foreign officers promenading the streets of 
Chengtu have been taken for foreign coolies be- 
cause they used their legs. The well-off China- 
man lolls on his couch or in his palanquin and 
grows fat, sleek and torpid if he is a sensualist, 
or frail and translucent if he is an ascetic. The 
scholar shuns vigorous exercise lest he should 
spoil his skill with the writing brush. Possibly 
he lets his nails grow and when they reach some 
inches of length protects them with a silver case. 

The soldier has come from the dregs and con- 
tempt for him has gone so far as to quench the 
natural admiration for the martial virtues. No 
civilian carries weapons, the duel is unknown, 
and there is little shame in showing the white 
feather. The mandarins look bold but often they 
are "lath painted to look like iron." Under 
nocturnal attack many a villager takes to his 
heels leaving his family to the robbers. The lat- 



308 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

ter give the foreign traveler a wide berth hav- 
ing learned the fellow will actually fight. The 
mere presence of the white passenger is said to 
brace the nerves of the boatmen in the perilous 
rapids of the Yangtse. It is not considered 
shameful to weep, and one often hears of men 
dissolved in tears. Yet the Chinese meet pain 
and death like Stoics, and Gordon and Wolseley 
declared they make brave soldiers when well led. 
"When well led, ' ' aye, there 's the rub ! For Chi- 
nese pusillanimity testifies not to want of nat- 
ural grit but to the fact that the bold manly 
qualities have not been stimulated among them, 
as they have been among us, by social apprecia- 
tion. 

For ages Chinese manhood has been scaled 
by the maxims of the Sages. Spectacled scholars 
have been the pace-setters and their psychology 
has been stamped deep on the national character. 
If the coolie sports fan and umbrella, it is not 
from effeminacy, but because the common people 
form themselves on the model of the literati. 
Pedants and book-worms, myopes and recluses 
have had to rule the Chinese, largely by moral 
force, and as their long suit is learning they 
naturally cry down bodily prowess. So debility 
has been supposed to be the necessary accompani- 
ment of intellect. The ascendancy of the in- 
tellectuals has damped the virility of the race 
and lies like a wet blanket on its active and com- 
bative impulses. Hence the Chinese will not cut 
their nails and harden their muscles till they 



THE FAE WEST OF THE FAE EAST 309 

have new ideals. Perhaps the Young Men's 
Christian Association with its slogan so inspiring 
to the young, "all-round development — physical, 
intellectual, moral, and religious — for myself and 
for others" is the best physician for the lethargy 
that lies like an evil spell on the energies of the 
yellow race. 



CHAPTEE VIII 

THE NEW EDUCATION" 

WHEN we came to board the ferry plying 
across the Yellow Eiver at Tungkwan 
Pass, the boatman slid out two pieces of plank 
whipsawed from a tree that had frequently 
changed its mind. They were so crooked they 
would turn over when you stepped on them. Of 
course our mules balked at the wretched gang- 
way, and half an hour was wasted in forcing them 
to leap into the boat. At debarkation more waste 
of time in making them jump from boat to beach. 
A proper gangway with cleats on it would have 
saved all the trouble. Now, these ferrymen 
make, say, three thousand trips a year and at 
least half the time mules are passengers. Ex- 
perience ought long ago to have convinced them 
that a mule will not trust himself to their crazy 
planks. But they ought to work ; so down to the 
present moment, no doubt, these planks are run 
out every time the ferry touches shore. 

It is a Chinese trait to go on employing a likely 
means without considering whether, as a matter 
of fact, they are getting the coveted results. The 
river junk has a big eye painted on either side 
of the prow so that the boat may "look see" its 
way. They have never inquired whether these 

310 



THE NEW EDUCATION 311 

optical craft fare better than others in the 
crowded waterways. Just inside the gateway to 
a courtyard a brick screen is built in order that 
the viewless flying demons of the air may collide 
disastrously with it when they seek to enter a 
domicile. To no one has it occurred to mark 
whether families without such screens have worse 
luck than other families. In the same uncritical 
mood our coolies would leave joss sticks burning 
before the wayside shrines and, two thousand 
miles from the sea, our boatmen, before starting 
on the perilous down-river trip, sacrificed a cock 
at the bow to bring good luck. The sentry on 
the escort boat moored alongside us rolled his 
drum and beat his triangle every quarter of an 
hour through the night to soothe us with the as- 
surance that he was awake and vigilant. The 
actual result was a ruined night's rest and the 
request next day that he desist from such marks 
of attention. The night watchman steadily claps 
as he goes his rounds, the theory being that his 
din will scare away the thieves. In all the 
centuries no one has pointed out that in practice 
the thieves are warned of the watchman's ap- 
proach and, once he is by, work in perfect se- 
curity. 

If such be the neglect to scrutinize results in 
simple matters, what guesswork there will be in 
the higher realm where effects are confused! 
Thus it looks as if moral precept will mold charac- 
ter; and so the Chinese endlessly rehearse precept 
without noting its utter want of effect. It looks 



312 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

as if memorizing the noble teachings of the Sages 
will form the incorruptible official; and so the 
classics are made the basis of training for gov- 
ernment service, with the result that nowhere 
does performance square less with professions 
than in China. It looks as if eloquent admoni- 
tions from the throne will check corruption; and 
so the hortatory edicts continue to pour forth. 
Of course they never can reform the mandarins, 
because they furnish no new incentive to right 
doing. It looks as if a fierce aspect would in- 
timidate the enemy; and so there were ''tiger" 
soldiers; in yellow-ochre hoods, with tiger strip- 
ings down the back of the uniform, and with shields 
painted to represent the tiger's open jaws! In 
like vein when, in 1842, the British troops marched 
on the Woosung forts, the Chinese general had a 
lot of conical mud heaps whitewashed so as to 
look at a distance like white tents, and thus sug- 
gest the presence of a larger garrison. These 
bright ideas, alas, somehow, never worked. It 
looks as if parents will make better matches than 
the young people, so they have given parents 
full control of matrimony; with the result that 
there are now in China more foot-bound wives, 
crippled from girlhood to please the perverted 
taste of fathers-in-law than there are men and 
women in the United States ! 

In a word, the Chinese have never accepted 
the principle of efficiency, which is, that the 
methods or means to be chosen for a given pur- 
pose should not be those which seem appropriate. 




Outlook tower of the Temple of the Flowing Waters 
in Southern Shensi. Founded about 200 B. C. 



THE NEW EDUCATION 315 

but those which actually do produce most surely, 
promptly, aud economically the coveted results. 
They fail to discriminate real from apparent 
fitness, because they have never made the 
efficiency of agents and processes an object of 
inquiry. 

Not that there is anything queer in the work- 
ing of the Oriental brain. Not in the least. 
Their popular thought is unripe, that is all. The 
bulk of the Chinese match up well with our fore- 
fathers between the fourteenth and seventeenth 
centuries. For in the Middle Ages white men 
were just as haphazard, casual and uncritical as 
are the yellow men to-day. They looked for 
' ' signs and wonders in the heavens ' ' and trembled 
at comets. They held that blood-root, on account 
of its red juice, must be a blood purifier; liver- 
wort, having a liver-shaped leaf, will cure liver 
disease ; eyebright, being marked with a spot like 
an eye, is good for eye troubles ; and so on. They 
fasted, exorcised demons, burned witches, trusted 
talismans, paraded sacred images, wore relics of 
the saints, sought the king's touch to cure scrofula, 
marched in religious processions to bring change 
of weather and hung consecrated bells in steeples 
to ward off lightning. It was the rise of the 
natural sciences that cleared the fog from the 
European brain. In the building of astronomy, 
physics, chemistry and physiology were wrought 
out certain methods — observation, measurement, 
trial and error, experiment — which were as help- 
ful for practical life as for science. For a method 



316 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

that connects cause and effect may also light up 
the relation between effort and result. 

The army of Frederick the Great is, perhaps, 
the first big instance of scientific method in the 
service of efficiency. Later, the Prussian civil 
service, French engineering, English machine in- 
dustry and British sanitary administration be- 
came the world's marvels. To-day, the great 
models are the army, consular service, labora- 
tories and industrial schools of Germany; the 
navy, municipalities and inspection services of 
Great Britain; the highways, art industries and 
viticulture of France; and the experiment sta- 
tions, reformatory systems and industrial plants 
of the United States. Not a day passes but the 
quest for maximum efficiency stirs the dry bones 
in some neglected field. Its watchwords are ' ' ac- 
counting, " "unit-costs," "cross checking," "case 
counting," "standardization," "scientific organi- 
zation. " It is displacing the argument method of 
determining policy. Reformatory and juvenile 
court, outdoor relief and charity organization, 
coeducation and vocational training, the religious 
revival and the institutional church, equal suffrage 
and the commission plan of city government — 
they will all stand or fall according to the outcome 
of the minute study of their results. Nothing, 
however fenced and sacred, can withstand the in- 
vasion, and by the middle of this century the 
principle of efficiency will be master in every de- 
partment of Western civilization. 

Pitting. China against a West armed with this 



THE NEW EDUCATION 317 

technique of success is like pitting the sixteenth- 
century man against the twentieth. Our fore- 
fathers would match us in intellect but not in 
practical power. Likewise the Chinese, for all 
their latent ability, are hopelessly outclassed by us 
in efficiency. Whenever they have measured 
strength with the West this ancient and proud 
people, assimilator of so many savage tribes and 
barbarian hordes, suzerain once of Korea, Annam, 
Siam, Burma and Nepaul, who have lighted in 
Eastern Asia a fire at which half a billion human 
beings warm their hands, has had a maddening 
sense of impotence — as of a trance-bound man 
who can neither stir nor cry out. 

It was Japan that shook China's faith in her- 
self. Her early clashes with English and French 
made little impression, for she had met warlike 
barbarians before. Defeat her they might, but in 
the end she led them captive with her civilization. 
These "red-haired" people were simply a new 
and very fierce race of barbarians — that was all. 
But when, in the war of 1894-95 the l ' Eastern is- 
landers," who owed all their knowledge and arts 
to China, overmatched them at every point, the 
Chinese were staggered. What else but their 
borrowings from the West could have made the 
Japanese suddenly so strong? Then came in 
quick succession the Emperor's reforms, the Em- 
press Dowager's coup d'etat, the humiliations of 
1900, and the burden of indemnities. It became 
clear that dismemberment and serfdom would be 
the doom of China unless some means were found 
is 



318 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

to energize this ocean of men. What finally sug- 
gested itself was the adoption of Western civiliza- 
tion in its main features and education in the 
special branches that underlie the arts of the 
West. 

The old education of China was concerned with 
Chinese history and classic literature. No 
science, nothing of the geography or history of 
other nations, nothing of mathematics but the 
rudiments. Of social science and government no 
more, than was embodied in the writings of the 
Sages. The object was to store the memory and 
cultivate an approved literary style. The gov- 
ernment provided no schools but held competitive 
examinations and conferred degrees. Its stamp 
gave the scholar his rating and to the successful 
the doors of preferment stood open. At the 
capitals were acres of tiny examination cells 
where annually several thousand aspirants passed 
three days in the throes of literary composition. 
Every morning some of them were taken out dead. 
About one per cent, were successful and entitled 
to enter the great triennial competitive examina- 
tion at Peking. From the victors in this test most 
of the government posts were filled. 

Six years ago the Empress Dowager swept all 
this away with one stroke of the vermilion pen and 
decreed a system of national education in which 
schools of all grades were to be provided by the 
government and the course of study should in- 
clude Western branches as well as Chinese 
studies. There was to be a primary school in 




Wayfarers resting in the shade of a tree protected by 
the monuments and the temple 




Traffic through the loess en route to the 
distant railroad 



, \ 



THE NEW EDUCATION 321 

every village, a grammar school in each of the 
walled towns from which a Jisien or district is 
governed, a "middle school" in every prefecture 
and for the province a college and a normal 
school. Frequently commercial, technical, agri- 
cultural, military and law schools were added. 
The edifice was crowned by the Imperial Uni- 
versity at Peking. 

Enthusiasm for the new education spread like 
wild fire. The examination cells were razed and 
on their site rose college halls. Schools were set 
up in temples and to-day, under lofty pillared 
roofs, you find little fellows in queues reciting be- 
fore the grim god of war or the benign Kwan- 
yin, goddess of mercy. Old schoolmasters threw 
themselves into "short courses" in order to find 
a footing in the new system. Those who had 
picked up the rudiments of some Western branch 
suddenly commanded salaries that were the envy 
of ripe scholars of the old type. Not long ago a 
provincial college sent to a neighboring Ameri- 
can school for a professor of mathematics. He 
must know arithmetic through Proportion and 
solve algebraic problems with one unknown quan- 
tity! The dearth of teachers prompted a great 
rush to Japan and three years ago there were 
fifteen thousand Chinese studying in Tokyo. 
Then the feeling toward Japan cooled and now the 
remnant there numbers not over three or four 
thousand. 

The report of the Ministry of Education for 
the Chinese year ending February last shows that 



322 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

in two years the number of schools at Peking has 
increased from 206 to 252 and the number of 
students from 11,417 to 15,774. Outside Peking 
the government schools grew in number from 
36,000 to 42,444 and the count of students had 
leaped from 1,013,000 to 1,285,000. The number 
of non-government schools exceeds the number 
of government schools. In Chihli, which naturally 
responds more promptly than any other province 
to Peking impulses, the provincial board of educa- 
tion provides a university at Tientsin, a college at 
Paotingfu, 17 industrial schools, 3 higher normal 
schools, 49 elementary normal schools, 2 medical 
colleges, 3 foreign-language schools, 8 commercial 
schools, 5 agricultural schools, 30 middle schools, 
174 higher elementary schools, 101 middle 
elementary schools, 8,534 lower elementary 
schools, 131 girls' schools and 174 half-day and 
night schools. 

Since Chihli is by no means typical, compare 
with it a backward province like Shensi with its 
eight million inhabitants. In 1909 its board of 
education was looking after two colleges and a law 
school with 520 students, 4 normal schools with 
410 students, 13 middle schools enrolling 800, 98 
higher elementary schools teaching 3,433, 21 
middle elementary schools with 817 pupils, and 
1,948 lower elementary schools with 41,121 pupils. 
Moreover, 180 girls were being taught in two girls ' 
schools. 

While the totals for the Empire are impressive, 
if one holds in mind the enormous population of 



THE NEW EDUCATION 323 

school age to be cared for, it is doubtful if the 
proportion of young Chinese in school to-day is a 
twenty-fifth of the proportion taught in American 
schools. Since the surplus of the people above 
their physical needs is so much slighter than ours, 
it will be impossible for China to expand education 
to the Western scale until the application of new 
economic methods has greatly stimulated the pro- 
duction of taxable wealth. 

An immense demand for text-books has sprung 
up and at Shanghai the Commercial Press, the 
biggest publishing house in Eastern Asia, employs 
a thousand people. From it issue primers, read- 
ers, histories, geographies, mathematics and 
science books in Chinese, English readers suited 
to adult beginners, annotated English classics, 
scrolls, wall-maps and science charts. In its 
translation department a hundred are kept busy 
and many scholarly minds are hammering out 
ideographic equivalents for the thousands of 
special terms in science, medicine and engineer- 
ing. These, when accepted by the Bureau of 
Terminology at Peking become a part of the 
Chinese language. 

Of course in the new education as in the old, 
Chinese has to be the ground work, so it is not 
in the elementary schools but in the middle schools 
and colleges that one meets with the difficulty of 
putting new wine into old bottles. The contrasts 
between these institutions and our own throw a 
strong light on the differences between China and 
the West. 



324 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

In the Board of War at Peking there are six 
hundred employes ; but fifty men do all the work. 
The rest are parasites, mostly Manchus, for whose 
sake, of course, the Imperial Government pri- 
marily exists. In a government so graft-ridden 
it would be too much to expect that the branch 
dealing with education should be entirely free. 
The large proportion of non-teaching officers in 
the schools suggests that soft berths have been 
provided for somebody's relatives or friends. In 
my university the corps of instructors is five 
times as large as the administrative force ; but in 
a Chinese school of modern languages with twenty- 
seven teachers I found ten administrators, to say 
nothing of the servants. Half of them twiddle 
their thumbs and draw their pay. In a higher 
commercial school with twenty teachers there are 
ten officers, of whom three are mere sinecurists. 
In a law school with 800 students there are twenty- 
five non-teaching officials, most of them sinecurists. 
In a technical high school with thirty teachers the 
dean leaves everything to the manager, the treas- 
urer's duties are performed by the assistant 
treasurer, the secretary's by the assistant secre- 
tary, and the head clerk does nothing but warm 
a chair. Four sinecurists out of twelve officers ! 

In view of the lack of money for good teachers 
the abundance of costly apparatus looks a bit sus- 
picious. In the entrance hall of a certain school 
you will see fine biological and botanical charts, 
but will learn on inquiry that no one on the staff 
can present the subjects or put the charts to use. 



THE NEW EDUCATION 325 

Elsewhere you will find a physical laboratory sup- 
plied with good apparatus covered with dust. The 
teacher knows nothing of physics save a little of 
electricity. In a remote provincial college I saw 
several hundred bottles and jars of chemicals — 
all from a single supply house in Tokyo — and not 
one in twenty had the seal broken. There was 
at least $1,500 worth — enough to stock three of our 
college laboratories. To the "old China hand" 
such extravagance indicates that some one is get- 
ting a commission on the supplies. In an educa- 
tional center far up the Yangtse the authorities 
keep bringing out American teachers at great ex- 
pense under a year contract and then at the end 
of the year replacing them with others no better 
qualified. Inasmuch as every such shift calls for 
an allowance of $300 for travel money, the know- 
ing ones suspect that some official gets ' ' squeeze ' ' 
on the travel money and that is the reason for 
the incessant changing of teachers. 

One is struck, too, by the casualness with which 
foreign teachers are picked up. It is obvious that 
hiring an Englishman to teach, botany solely on 
the personal recommendation of the German pro- 
fessor of mathematics is no way to get good men. 
When, forty years ago, the Japanese launched 
their modern schools, they applied to the gov- 
ernments or the university presidents of the West 
for teachers, and these took a pride in sending 
their very best. Those who adapted themselves 
were retained for twenty or thirty years — until 
Japan had reared fit scholars of her own to take 



326 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

their places. But the Chinese, selecting in hap- 
hazard fashion and holding out nothing in the way 
of security of tenure, fail to get from the West 
the educational help they so greatly need. 

Not only are the foreign instructors uneven but 
the Chinese drop them altogether too soon. In 
a certain capital I visited a college and a normal 
school. The grounds are spacious and about the 
dozen courts connected by covered walks and en- 
closed by low tiled buildings, hangs "the still air 
of delightful studies." But the four hundred 
blue-gowned young men are taught by twenty- 
five professors of whom only one is a foreigner, 
and he is a Japanese. None of the others has 
ever been outside of the Middle Kingdom. The 
professor of German is a raw-looking youth who 
could not understand one sentence in four in that 
tongue. In preparation the professors are, per- 
haps, abreast of our college juniors. It is "the 
blind leading the blind" — yet this is the crown of 
the educational system of a province with more 
people than Pennsylvania has ! 

When English or Americans teach in China no 
interpreter is necessary since all the pupils in 
the higher schools are expected to know English. 
But foreigners at from $1,400 to $1,800 a year 
are expensive. Japanese teachers require far less 
pay, but as they have to teach through an in- 
terpreter they waste half the student's time. If 
the interpreter is not familiar with the subject 
his hearers glean little. Moreover, some intelli- 
gent Chinese firmly believe that in obedience to 



THE NEW EDUCATION 327 

secret instructions the Japanese teacher — of 
medicine, for example — keeps back from his stu- 
dents some of the finer points of his subject. "When 
certain strange gaps are discovered in the knowl- 
edge of his students, the professor pleads that he 
duly explained these matters but that his hearers 
failed to understand him. This surmise hooks up 
with the undoubted fact that in the Japanese 
military schools, when the professor reaches some 
new or special point in his subject, he requests the 
Chinese students present to withdraw and dis- 
closes it only to the Japanese students. How- 
ever unjust the suspicion, it is certain that the 
teachers from Japan are being rapidly dropped 
and it does not seem likely that the Japanese are 
destined to be the conveyers of Western learning 
to China. 

The broad contrast between China and Japan 
in utilizing Western scholars runs back to their 
difference in attitude toward our civilization. The 
Japanese were humble and teachable. Long ago 
they had borrowed heavily from the mainland and 
they were not too proud to sit awhile at the feet 
of Western scholars. But the Chinese, remem- 
bering that their culture is all their own, are still 
too haughty to recognize fully their need of the 
foreign educator. They simply do not compre- 
hend the massiveness and depth of this alien cul- 
ture they are trying to assimilate so quickly. They 
look upon us as clever barbarians who have sur- 
passed them in mastery of the physical sciences 
and the mechanic arts : of our advancement in the 



328 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

knowledge of the mind, of ethics, of society and 
government, the very fields the Chinese regard as 
distinctively their own, they have no apprecia- 
tion. 

Even the scholar-viceroy, Chang Chih-Tung, 
whose plea "China's Only Hope" created such 
a furore twelve years ago, and who as President 
of the Imperial Board of Education finally in- 
troduced the reform he had championed — even 
he never realized the giant bulk of our learning. 
He .deemed six months a reasonable time to spend 
on the Western branches and thought two years 
ample for complete mastery. So he left the cur- 
riculum so clogged with Chinese studies that the 
student is crushed under the load. The poor fel- 
low is in the classroom thirty-five to forty hours 
a week. Add an hour a day for military drill 
and the daily time left him for study and read- 
ing is not over two hours. The result too often 
is cram and sham. Thus at one time the cur- 
riculum called for calculus in the junior year. 
When the literary chancellor of the province in- 
spected a certain government college its Ameri- 
can president showed him that the juniors could 
not possibly reach calculus. The chancellor in- 
sisted that he must report on the subject, so 
at his suggestion the professor of mathematics 
gave a couple of lectures on "the uses of cal- 
culus." The students were examined on these 
and thereupon duly certified to as "proficient in 
calculus." 

Another head, a Han-lin man, after the cigars 



THE NEW EDUCATION 331 

were lighted, confessed that he hesitated whether 
to stick or to resign so difficult is it to manage 
his provincial college under a Board of Educa- 
tion that ignores all his recommendations and pays 
no attention to local needs and conditions. "How 
can I keep my self-respect," he broke out, "when 
constantly I am forced to do foolish things ? Here 
is an applicant thirty-five years old who passes a 
brilliant entrance examination, but under the cast- 
iron regulations handed down from Peking I can't 
admit him because he is not " 'a graduate of a 
middle school' "! 

This Board of Education is composed of old 
literary graduates who, having never been out- 
side of China, underrate the learning that lies 
behind the terrible efficiency of the West. When 
I called, the acting head was a conservative 
Manchu, who seemed to feel sure that China knows 
what she wants and can just take her time about 
it. The Manchus, mark you, are not a cultured 
people. In the time of Shakespeare they were 
where the Afghans are to-day. Few of them have 
ever studied abroad, and a Manchu directing the 
new education in China is as out of place as a 
Goth directing the schools of Athens in the fourth 
century. I even heard of a Manchu literary 
chancellor who could not read the examination 
essays submitted for provincial honors. So he 
piled them on the canopy of his bed, poked them 
with his cane as he lay smoking his pipe, and 
the thirteen that slid off first were declared 
winners ! 



332 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

With us education is a satisfying career, and 
the president of the state university is not schem- 
ing for the governor's chair. But in China, an 
ambitious mandarin who has been prefect and 
hopes to become taotai will be given charge of a 
provincial school till something better turns up. 
As he brings to it no enthusiasm or special train- 
ing he is apt to treat it as any other government 
post. I recall a college director who knows noth- 
ing of English or Western learning or the art 
of education. He runs the school for secret profit 
to himself and welcomes no suggestions from the 
three foreign members of his faculty. The Amer- 
ican instructor, who is eager to help the institution 
reach the Western standard, is politely given to 
understand that he is paid to do definite work 
and keep his mouth shut. 

The characteristics of Chinese students throw a 
strong light on the race mind at its present stage. 
Their reaction to teaching is much weaker than 
that of American students. It is against China's 
educational tradition to question anything taught. 
Teacher and text are invested with a prestige un- 
known to us and there is no demand for explana- 
tion or proof. Moreover, questioning would im- 
ply that the lecturer had not been clear. Hence 
the instructor is staggered by the unresponsive- 
ness of his class. He can only illustrate his princi- 
ple on every side in the hope that if one illustra- 
tion fails another will ring the mental bell. 

At first the student regards the experiment, 
cabinet specimen, or microscope slide as the il- 



THE NEW EDUCATION 333 

lustration rather than the source of the principle ; 
for nothing in Chinese tradition suggests the direct 
interrogating of Nature. Later, when he has 
learned to use apparatus, he becomes fascinated 
with the all-daylight route to truth. In some 
schools I found the students enthusiastic over 
chemistry just because it affords them the novel 
pleasure of learning by demonstration. They are 
sharp observers and nothing in the experiment 
escapes them. They catch its significance, too, 
though one man complained that his boys recorded 
with scrupulous care unintended and irrelevant 
happenings such as the cracking of the test tube. 
Thanks to his drill in recognizing and forming 
thousands of characters some of them calling for 
more than thirty strokes of the brush, the Chinese 
youth bears the palm for feats of memory. He 
tries to learn even geometry and physics by rote. 
One professor called the attention of his class to 
certain tables of logarithms and the next day his 
students complained of the lesson as "very hard." 
They had tried to memorize them. In geometry 
they will learn the proofs given them by heart 
but do not take quickly to mathematical reason- 
ing. Says one teacher, "I have to give them a 
year for the plane geometry the American boy 
gets in half a year. ' ' Says another, ' ' My boys get 
on swimmingly with their problems if I provide 
them with a rule; without it they flounder help- 
less." A third estimates that not over a quarter 
of his students can think. They remember words, 
but not ideas or trains of reasoning, and it is 



334 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

doubtful if ten per cent, can handle with success 
a new type of problem for which they have been 
given no rule. 

All this would be very flattering to our race 
pride but for the fact that nearly all the educa- 
tors attribute it to defective training rather than 
to race deficiency. One has a boy raised in a 
missionary family who is free from these faults. 
Another has noticed that after two or three years 
his boys wake up and begin to think for them- 
selves. A French priest tells me that in his 
seminary there are four students who would be 
prizemen in France. A mathematical professor 
reports originality "here and there" and has one 
pupil who has solved many original theorems. 
Another has a lad in calculus who is the peer of 
any white youth he ever taught. A famous 
sinologue scouts the idea that the Chinese lack in 
reasoning power and points out that recently the 
three Chinese in the Naval Academy at Greenwich 
led their class in mathematics. He insists that 
the want of "come back" when the teacher ad- 
vances a proposition is not inborn, but is due to 
faults in the lower schools. 

There is some complaint that the students lack 
tenacity. They are easily disheartened and give 
up before difficulties that would only arouse the 
pugnacity of the American youth. A Chinese 
lecturer on medicine contrasted rather sadly the 
lack of sustained courage in his students with the 
pluck of the Japanese, who throw themselves in- 
defatigably upon their hard problems as their 



THE NEW EDUCATION 335 

countrymen dashed again and again npon the de- 
fenses of Port Arthur. This fault may be due to 
the loss of the military virtues; still, it may be a 
race trait. For if there is any difference between 
the endowment of the yellow race and that of 
the white it will be found, I think, not in intellect, 
but in energy of will. 

There is a striking contrast between the laxity 
in the Chinese schools and the strict, semi-mili- 
tary discipline that, from the first, prevailed in 
the schools of Japan. One hears of amazing in- 
cidents — students refusing to take an examination 
till they get ready, cutting a written recitation, 
cribbing openly and without rebuke, forcing the 
dean to cut down the lesson assigned, withhold- 
ing the customary salute, of rising and bowing, 
from the teacher who has not corrected their exer- 
cises to suit them, rebelling against a fee of $20 a 
year for food, lodging and instruction, slamming 
their rice on the floor or hurling it at the head 
of the steward if its quality does not please them. 
The dean will direct the foreign teacher to set 
an examination all can pass, or else to mark no 
paper below the passing grade. Individually the 
Chinese student is docile, even reverent; but 
collectively he is a terror to the school officers. 
The wholesome vigor with which the American 
educator flunks, whips, or expels stands in re- 
freshing contrast to Chinese timidity, and par- 
ents who can afford it show their appreciation by 
sending their sons to mission colleges. 

The truth is, there is nothing the Chinese lack 



336 L THE CHANGING CHINESE 

so much as discipline. Discipline of the army, the 
workshop, the ship, the school, the athletic field — 
yes, even of the home — is needed if they are ever 
to develop that smooth, intelligent team-work 
which makes our race so formidable. Their stand- 
by now is mass action — the strike or the boycott. 
During the last two years every school in Shan- 
tung is said to have had a strike. One school 
struck because the foreign teachers required the 
student to pass an examination before they would 
give him a testimonial. Strikes occur alike in 
boys' schools and girls' schools, and for the most 
un-understandable reasons. The Chinese school- 
master frequently gives in, so when the American 
principal hardens his jaw and points to the door, 
the students are painfully surprised. This facility 
in concerted action is really a weakness for it re- 
veals a certain flabbiness of individuality in the 
Chinese. "When folly is afoot in an American col- 
lege, there will be some who by standing aloof 
spoil the unanimity of the move and it doesn't 
come off. But the Chinese lad crumples under 
mass pressure. All his life he has been trained 
to get in line and so the spirit of conformity rules 
him. It is all due to a struggle for existence so 
severe that he realizes he cannot survive without 
the steady backing of his family, clan or guild. 
To take a line of one's own would be suicide. 

Chinese gentlemen wear their finger nails long 
to show they don't work, so it is not surprising 
that young China despises anything with the taint 
of manual labor. The professor of engineering 



THE NEW EDUCATION 337 

has to speak sharply to his students to get them 
actually to carry chain and drive stakes, for they 
consider it ' ' coolie work. ' ' Their idea is to listen 
and look, but not to do. When the mission school 
at Swatow was preparing for some festivity a 
lady teacher said, "Come, boys, help me move 
these heavy benches." Not a boy stirred; it was 
" coolie work." Since then they have learned 
better. In another school the pupils refused to 
bring in more chairs to seat the guests at a re- 
ception. They had been trained to care for their 
rooms, but the mandarins were present, and, know- 
ing the standards of these gentlemen, they were 
afraid of ' ' losing face. ' ' The old-school mandarin 
looks down on the mining engineer or the rail- 
way engineer as a kind of coolie because he soils 
his hands, and mummies of this type in Peking 
are trying to draw an invidious distinction be- 
tween the returned students who have had a liberal 
education abroad and those who have had a 
technical education, the latter ranking lower. 

Bodily development is scorned for it would as- 
similate one to the despised coolie, mountebank, 
or soldier. On six weeks of overland journey, I 
met at least three hundred Chinese with sedan 
chairs and never but once did I see the owner of 
a chair walking. Up the steepest mountain stair- 
ways they insisted on being carried, lying back 
limp and lackadaisical as if it were a condescen- 
sion to breathe. To stroll, bird cage in hand, on 
the city wall in the cool of the evening and give 
birdie an airing, is their idea of a gentleman's 

16 



338 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

exercise. When the tennis court was first nsed by 
the American professors in a certain North China 
university, the Chinese could not understand the 
absurd antics and caperings of their erstwhile 
dignified teachers. "Can you not afford to hire 
coolies to do this for you?" asked an interested 
but scandalized observer. 

Doctor Merrins' measurements in the mission 
school at Wuchang seem to show that the Chinese 
boy between his eleventh and his sixteenth year 
is from two and a half to four inches shorter, 
and from seven to fifteen pounds lighter, than the 
Boston boy of the same age. In the same years 
the Chinese girl appears to be from three to five 
inches shorter and from fourteen to twenty-four 
pounds lighter than the American girl. In fact, 
American girls seem to be heavier than the boys 
of Central China. The thoracic capacity is poor ; 
so one is not surprised that the death rate from 
tuberculosis in the government schools is "enor- 
mous" owing to hard study and close confine- 
ment during the growing period, and that half 
the young Chinese entering the Y. M. C. A. gym- 
nasium at Shanghai show consumptive tendencies, 
and are at once urged to open the windows of their 
sleeping rooms, remove the curtains from their 
beds and take special gymnastic exercises. 

One lady principal complains that her girls are 
in a constant blush while studying hygiene, for 
they have been taught to ignore their bodies. Nor 
is it easy to make them hold themselves erect. 
Their Chinese teachers, like all literary men, culti- 



THE NEW EDUCATION 339 

vate the scholar's stoop and the pupils imitate it 
just as men with good eyesight wear broad- 
rimmed goggles in order to look like scholars. 
Another principal found that in their field-meets 
his pupils relied on their natural powers of run- 
ning and jumping. The idea of deliberately train- 
ing for athletic proficiency did not appeal to them. 
"Bob" Gailey at Peking will tell you that at first 
the Chinese hung back in athletic sports for fear 
of "losing face" by being defeated. Sometimes 
a football team would quit abruptly when the game 
was going against them. Gradually, however, 
they are being brought around to the spirit of 
sportsmanship. 

Few of the government schools have got be- 
yond the idea of drill or provided a director of 
physical training. You see the students under a 
big roof swinging Indian clubs or drilling with 
rifles. In one case, indeed, lissome young men 
with queues were skipping about the tennis courts, 
but they wore their hampering long gowns and 
their strokes had the snap of a kitten playing with 
a ball of yarn. In fact, the first football and base- 
ball in China were played by boys in those same 
blue gowns. In developing a taste for sports the 
mission schools succeed far better than the gov- 
ernment schools because the men in charge have 
genuine enthusiasm and bring their personal in- 
fluence to bear. 

The response of the yellow race indicates sport 
as something of universal human appeal. The 
last of the all-China field meets at Canton under 



340 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

the lead! of '.that noble institution, the Canton 
Christian College, lasted for two days, enrolled 
over a thousand contestants and drew twenty 
thousand spectators. The first meet of the kind 
at Tientsin attracted seven thousand, and the 
second, held November last, brought together 
twenty thousand. When one hundred and forty 
athletes strove for honors in the national games 
held at Nanking in connection with the Nanking 
Industrial Exhibition, a thousand enthusiastic 
Chinese came all the way from Shanghai, two 
hundred miles distant. The Chinese now manage 
such events themselves and officials from the 
Viceroy down to the hsien magistrate attend and 
applaud. Just as in inner Borneo football is the 
one enthusiasm common to Britons and Malays, 
so the athletic feats of Young China are weav- 
ing a new bond between Chinese and Anglo- 
Saxons. None of them suspect us of sinister de- 
signs in inciting their youth to make the most of 
the body,, But athletics will strengthen the 
character of Young China as well as the body. In 
the stations out along the wire that connects 
Peking with Thibet I found graduates from the 
telegraph schools of Shanghai and Tientsin turn- 
ing themselves into effeminate dandies with love- 
locks framing the face and giving themselves up 
to sensual pleasure, because their lives held no 
interest to compete with the gaudy lure of the 
"sing-song" girls. 

All his teachers bear witness to the beauty, ac- 
curacy and detail of the anatomical or botanical 



THE NEW EDUCATION 341 

drawings made by the Chinese student. This 
deft hand comes from his long practice in form- 
ing thousands of characters which may not be 
carelessly scrawled as ours are, but must be made 
with great delicacy and precision if they are to 
be distinguished apart. From this same handling 
of the brush comes the student's light, sure touch 
in preparing specimens or slides. But this sup- 
pleness of hand is bought with a price. "Why 
is it," I asked the heads of the two Imperial 
Universities of Japan, "that your students reach 
the university at the age of twenty-one, three 
years later than the American students?" "Be- 
cause," they agreed, "we are burdened with a 
clumsy language which takes from three to five 
years longer to master than your alphabetic 
language. ' ' Here is a heavy handicap which the 
peoples of the Far East must bear while they are 
vying with the West. "How long will it take," 
I asked a scholar who has spent half his life in 
China, "before the Chinese give up their ideo- 
graphs?" "Perhaps five centuries," he replied. 
There is a very practical aspect to the problem. 
A font of our type weighs fifty pounds and costs 
five dollars; a font of Chinese type weighs half 
a ton and costs a hundred dollars. No type- 
writer can write Chinese characters, no linotype 
machine can set them. The keyboard would be 
as big as a dinner table! A typesetter in the 
Commercial Press walks about a pen four feet 
by seven and fills his stick from seven thousand 
little boxes each about an inch and a half square. 



342 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

It costs more to equip and produce a Chinese 
newspaper and it cannot hope to be so universally 
read as one of our sheets. For the Celestials 
can never teach so large a proportion of their 
youth to read a language that takes three or four 
times as long to learn as a Western language. 

At present not one woman in a thousand and 
not one man in ten can read. Nevertheless, the 
reformers are agitating for compulsory education. 
They propose that the scholars work out a set of 
three thousand simplified characters. Establish 
schools everywhere to spread a knowledge of 
these among the people. Let the newspapers use 
only these characters. Let a board of trust- 
worthy men send out from Peking news regard- 
ing public affairs and let local committees print 
and circulate this civic news in a sheet which 
every man will be expected to subscribe for. 
Utopian, to be sure, but it shows the reformers 
realize that the selfish private spirit has been 
their country's bane. 

Eight here we come upon the gravest problem 
arising from China's change of base; whence 
will come the morality of to-morrow? In the 
reaction against the old classical education with 
its emphasis on ethics there has been a tendency 
to neglect instruction in morals. Though they 
must do homage once a month to Confucius' 
tablet, the young men are inwardly scoffing. 
"Confucius! He never rode on a train or used 
the telephone or sent a wireless. What did he 
know of science f He is only an old fogy ! ' ' And 



THE NEW EDUCATION 343 

so the Sage, whose teachings have kept myriads 
within the safe way, has little authority over the 
educated part of the rising generation. What 
they covet is riches and power; and, perceiving 
that the wealth and martial prowess of the West 
rests immediately upon exact knowledge, the 
students are all for science. The hidden moral 
foundations of Western success they are apt to 
overlook. Neglecting their own idealism and 
missing ours, they may develop a selfish material- 
istic character which will make the awakening of 
China a curse instead of a blessing. 

At this crisis the dozen-odd mission colleges 
planted about the Empire, mainly by Americans, 
have the opportunity to render a great and states- 
manlike service. In organization, management, 
staff, curriculum and discipline the best of them 
are far superior to the government colleges. In 
their work they apply a scientific pedagogy of 
which the Chinese know nothing. They impart 
Western ideals of bodily development, clean liv- 
ing, individuality and efficiency. They study 
Confucian ethics with deep reverence; they pre- 
sent also the Christian outlook on life. Though 
many of their graduates are not Christians, they 
go out with high ideals. The gentry more and 
more appreciate these colleges and gladly send 
their sons thither when the fees are made high 
enough to eliminate any element of gratuity. 

Already wealthy Chinese are making gifts to 
these colleges. They will give much more if the 
religious societies that founded them could widen 



344 THE CHANGING CHINESE 

their vision to perceive that the true destiny of 
these colleges is to promote higher education in 
China, just as Harvard, Yale, Princeton and 
scores of other colleges founded with Christian 
money to train clergyman, recognized at last that 
their true destiny was to promote higher educa- 
tion in America. Let these mission colleges make 
Christian indoctrination and worship optional in- 
stead of compulsory on their students. Let them 
give patriotic Chinese representation on their 
governing boards. Let them, without surrender- 
ing autonomy, seek for some basis on which they 
can enter the educational system of the Govern- 
ment. Let them but have faith that the whole- 
hearted promotion of the higher intellectual life 
cannot but widen the sway of Christian ideals and 
they will become a giant power for good at this 
crisis in Chinese morals. 

The Crucifixion was two hundred and eighty 
years old before Christianity won toleration in the 
Eoman Empire. It was one hundred and twenty- 
eight years after Luther's defiance before the 
permanence of the Protestant Reformation was 
assured. After the discovery of the New World 
one hundred and fifteen years elapsed before the 
first English colony was planted here. No one 
who saw the beginning of these great, slow, his- 
toric movements could grasp their full import or 
witness their culmination. But nowadays world 
processes are telescoped and history is made at 
aviation speed. The exciting part of the trans- 



THE NEW EDUCATION 345 

formation of China will take place in our time. 
In forty years there will be telephones and mov- 
ing-picture shows and appendicitis and sanitation 
and baseball nines and bachelor maids in every 
one of the thirteen hundred hsien districts of the 
Empire. The renaissance of a quarter of the 
human family is occurring before our eyes and 
we have only to sit in the parquet and watch the 
stage. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Age at marriage, 69, 97, 110, 

209. 
Age, sanctity of, 193. 
Agriculture, 46, 71-78, 110, 

122, 302. 
Alcoholism, 144, 172. 
American mission work, 224, 

227. 
Ancestor worship, 69, 96, 110. 
Anglo-Saxons, 52, 340. 
Anti-matrimonial associations, 

204. 
Anti-Opium Edict, 145, 146, 

156, 157, 161, 217. 
Anti-Opium societies, 157, 164. 
Army, the new, 113-4, 162, 

280-282. 
Arrested development, 54-5. 
Asile de la Sainte Enfance, 101, 

234. 
Assimilative power, 57, 62, 317. 
Associations, prohibition of, 

145. 
Athletics, 339-40. 

Birth rate, 110. 
Blood-poisoning, resistance to, 

35-39. 
Board of Education, 97, 328- 

331. 
Boats, 13, 14, 310. 
Bodily development, 337-340. 



Boys, 96-101, 182, 272, 298, 
301, 304, 333-339. 

Brevity of life, 84, 104. 

Bridges, 271, 286, 303. 

Buddhism, 29, 218, 255-6, 266, 
279. 

Burnings of opium parapher- 
nalia, 164. 

Camels, 29, 260. 

Canton, 7, 85, 90, 175, 340. 

Capital, need of, 120. 

Cash, 85-6, 265, 282. 

Cato the Elder, 203. 

Cave dwellings, 21-22, 74. 

Cess pools, 295, 301-2. 

Chairing, 286, 307, 337. 

Chang Chih-Tung, 328. 

Character, Chinese, 29-30, 233- 

235, 255, 266, 282, 304-309, 

334, 336, 243. 
Cheapness of labor, 117-120, 

297. 
Cheapness of life, 89, 90. 
Chengtu, 117, 302-304. 
Child-bearing, 36-7. 
Child betrothal, 181, 194, 206, 

209-10. 
Children, 14, 17, 33, 41, 45, 69, 

85, 98-105, 301, 304. 
China Inland Mission, 255, 274. 
Chloroform, reaction to, 40. 



349 



350 



INDEX 



Christianity, 217, 219-20, 223; Deforestation, 7, 18, 22-27, 73, 

fruits, 233-235; official rec- 79, 271-273. 

ognition, 235-6; uplift of Density of population, 105, 302. 

women, 205, 240-242; pros- Dilapidation, 8, 11. 

pects, 255-259. Discipline, 335-6. 

Christians, 198, 205, 212, 217, Disease, 298, 338; resistance to, 

230-239, 241, 250, 274. 35-46. 

Cigarettes, 86. Domestic animals, 3, 13, 71, 

Cities, 3, 4, 14, 15, 78, 95, 109, 294. 

181, 286, 295, 303. Dreariness of life, 105, 142-3, 

Civilization, stage of, 54, 57. 287, 301. 

Clan ties, 17, 69, 98, 127-8, Dress, 11, 12, 105, 143, 189, 273. 

235. 



Cleanliness, 235, 246, 249. 

Club-houses, 13. 

College students, 97, 209, 332- 

343. 
Combativeness, 112-114, 307-8. 
Commercial competition, 1 14- 

119, 138. 
Commercial morality, 125-128, 

137. 
Commercial Press, the, 323. 
Commissions, 125-127. 
Compromise, 91. 
Concubinage, 101, 188-9, 204. 
Confucianism, 202, 217, 256-7, 

279, 285. 
"Confucio-Christianity," 256. 
Confucius, 212, 256-7, 342. 
Conjugal love, 196, 240. 
Conservation, need of, 24-27, 

271-273. 
Conservatism, 53-58. 
Coolies, 84-5, 143, 294, 296-7, 

308. 
Crop watchers, 267. 
"Crying one's wrongs," 197. 

Daughteb-in-law, 198. 
Death rate, 109-10. 



Economic difficulties of China, 

66, 69, 110. 
Education, the old, 318; the 

new, 318-344; extent, 321- 

323. 
Efficiency, the principle of, 

312-316. 
Eloquence, 52. 

Emigration, 106-111, 121, 137. 
Employment, scarcity of, 91. 
Empress Dowager, 145, 179, 

261, 317. 
Engineers, Chinese as, 61. 
England, opium policy of, 140- 

1, 170-172. 
English mission work, 224, 

227. 
Erosion, 23-4, 73, 271-273. 
Ethics, 65, 203, 328, 342-3. 
Examinations, 54, 318. 
Expert, the white, 61, 132-3. 
Exploitation of nature, 70-79, 

121-2, 134, 137, 286, 302. 

"Face," dread of losing, 169, 

337. 
Familism, 65, 102. 



INDEX 



351 



Family, the Chinese, 17, 65, 69, 
96-102, 110, 188-190, 193, 
196, 202-3, 287. 
Family intercourse, 7, 287. 
Family size, 97-101, 110. 
Famine, 90, 106, 108. 
Favoritism, 127-131. 
Fecundity, 69, 110, 142. 
Female education, 202-3, 205- 

213, 241, 245. 
Fengsiangfu, 282-286. 
Ferry, 310. 
Fertility, means of preserving, 

77-8, 302. 
Fevers, reaction to, 36-41. 
Flea traps, 89. 
Floors, 8, 105, 301. 
Fokien, 23, 106, 109, 121, 157, 

160, 181, 229, 239. 
Foochow, 162-164, 183. 
Food, 78-80, 142-3, 151, 160, 

274, 301-2. 
Footbinding, 36, 64, 174-182, 

193, 246, 294, 312. 
"Foreign devil," 293. 
Foreign enterprises, 120, 131. 
Foreign goods, 279. 
Foreign teachers, 325-327, 332. 
Formosa, 103, 142. 
Fouchou hsien, 158-9. 
Fruit, 72, 134-5, 301. 
Fuel, 7, 79. 
Fuel-gatherers, 23, 79. 

Gambling, 95, 141-2, 190, 235, 

265. 
Game, 27, 304. 
Gardens, 72, 265. 
Gentry, Chinese, 8, 27, 40, 72, 

166, 180, 190, 239, 265-6, 

343. 



Girls, 98, 104, 177-182, 241, 

242, 287, 288, 388. 
Girls' schools, 203-211, 217, 

245. 
Gleaning, 80, 83, 268. 
Government, 22, 27, 52, 90, 95, 

109, 121-2, 127, 130-134, 

151-166, 293, 312, 318. 
Graves, 18. 
Great Wall, 27-29. 
Group solidarity, 91, 127, 

235-6. 
Groves, sacred, 289. 
Guild-halls, 12, 13. 

Hakkas, 122, 175, 183. 

Handicrafts, 84. 

Hanyang steel works, 117-8, 

132. 
Harvesters, 267-8, 282, 285. 
Heart disease, 84-5, 196. 
Home, the Chinese, 177, 190. 
Hong Kong, 17, 41, 101, 103, 

109, 203, 210, 234. 
House-boats, 13, 14. 
Humor, 63. 
Hunting, 27, 304. 

Ideals, 233, 304-309. 
Idealism, 92, 233-4. 
Ideographs, 187, 323, 333, 

341-2. 
Ideographic language, 54, 

341-2. 
Idols, 92, 218-9, 288-9, 321. 
Illiteracy, 64, 110, 145, 342. 
Immigration of Chinese, 47-8. 
Immunity, 39-46. 
Imperial Government, 121-2, 

128, 139-40, 145, 151, 160- 

162, 180, 223, 317-8. 



352 



INDEX 



Indemnity for mission losses, 

252, 255. 
Individualism, 65. 
Individuality, 336. 
Individualization, 69, 206-211. 
Industrial competition of 

Chinese, 47-8, 114. 
Industrial management, 122- 

137. 
Inefficiency, 133-4, 310-317. 
Infant mortality, 33, 102-104, 

109. 
Infanticide, 98, 104, 178, 193, 

197, .241, 285. 
Inns, 143, 294-5. 
Insensibility, 40-1. 
Insanity, 196. 
Intellectual capacity, 58, 61- 

63, 315, 317, 333-4. 
Intervention in law-suits, 252. 
Irrigation, 302-3. 

Japanese, the, 8, 11, 53, 63, 
109, 113-4, 182, 317, 325- 
327, 334-5, 341. 

Jews in China, the, 57. 

Junks, 13, 310. 

Kansuh, 106, 141, 152, 160, 

174, 175, 280, 285. 
Kerosene, 7, 29, 86, 279. 
Kidnapping, 98. 
Kinship bond, 17. 
Kowloon, 23, 24. 
Kuangtung, 101, 106, 175. 

Labor cost, 119-20. 
Laborers, Chinese as, 47-8. 
Lamaism, 216. 
Lamps, 86. 
Lepers, 89, 90. 



"Liberty girls," 210-1. 
Lighting, 4-7, 303. 
Loess, 18-22, 24, 78, 261. 

Male predominance, 187-193, 
200-204. 

Manchus, 57, 113, 145, 175, 
280, 324, 331. 

Mandarins, 3, 4, 122, 127, 131, 
133, 151-159, 217, 219, 224, 
286, 290, 307, 312, 331-2, 
337. 

Manufactures, 114-119, 137. 

Marriage, 96-7, 194-5, 204-211. 

Mass action, 91, 336. 

"Mass movements," 236. 

Match making, 96, 178-8, 194- 
5, 241, 209-10, 312. 

Materialism, 91-2, 233. 

Memory, feats of, 333. 

Mencius, 96, 184, 212. 

Middle Ages, China's resem- 
blance to the, 3, 262, 315. 

Military potentiality, 46, 112- 
114, 280-282, 307-8. 

Mind of Chinese, ch. III. 

Mineral deposits, 70, 120-122, 
262. 

Mining, 121-2, 131-133, 262. 

Mining concessions, 120. 

Mission colleges, 224, 227, 245, 
335-6, 339, 343-4. 

Mission girls' schools, 179, 205- 
211, 245, 249, 275, 338. 

Mission property, 229, 251-2, 
255. 

Missionaries, 157-8, 160, 179, 
206, 212, 273-275, 279; nu- 
merical strength, 219-20; re- 
ception, 220-224 ; national 
contrasts, 224-227; types, 



INDEX 



353 



216-7, 228-230; influence, 

245-249 ; critics, 249-251 ; 

mistakes, 251-2; problems, 

252, 255; outlook, 255-259. 
Missionary homes, 205, 274. 
Mixed society, absence of, 141, 

190. 
Mobs, 64, 113, 220, 223, 252. 
Modesty, female, 183-5, 189. 
Mohammedans, Chinese, 106, 

112, 174, 276, 280. 
Money changing, 265. 
Mongols, 28-9, 267, 286, 294, 

298. 
Monuments, 12, 187, 261. 
Morality, 211-2, 261, 311-2, 

342-344. 
Mother-in-law, 197-8. 

Natural-foot Society, 177, 

180-1, 217. 
Natural selection, 42-48. 
Nepotism, 91, 127-8. 
Nestorianism, 57, 276. 
Neurasthenia, 196. 
Newspapers, 110, 145, 166, 

341-2. 
North China, 3, 18-22, 27-30, 

294-5. 
North Chinese, 29, 30. 

Offspring, appreciation of, 8*9, 

98-101. 
Old age support, 65, 98. 
Old people, 64-5. 
Opium, price of, 149, 150, 158- 

160, 170; the trade in, 139, 

140, 170-172, 250. 
Opium dens, closing of, 162- 

166. 
Opium growing, description, 



146, 149; extent, 150, 151; 
suppression, 151-160, 170, 
172, 217. 

Opium refuge, 217. 

Opium smoking, history, 139- 
141; extent, 95, 141; causes, 
141-145, 190; effects, 139, 
141, 161, 162, 172, 265; sup- 
pression, 109, 160-169; opin- 
ion regarding, 166, 169, 224. 

Opium war, 140. 

Originality, 54. 

Overcrowding, 39, 45-6. 

Overpopulation, 66, 69, 104-5, 
110, 301-2. 

Overwork, 84-5. 

Pace of labor, the, 84-5. 
Pailoics, 12, 187. 
Parasitism, 280, 324. 
Parental authority, 193, 204- 

206, 210, 240. 
Patriotism, the new, 145, 166, 

169, 170, 281. 
Pawn shops, 12. 
Pei-lin, 276. 
Peking, 4, 156, 171, 216, 251, 

276, 318, 321, 323-4, 331, 

342. 
Peking-Hankow Railway, 21, 

24, 128. 
Peking Syndicate, 120. 
Philanthropy, 245. 
Physical types, 267, 298. 
Physicians, opinions of, 34-42. 
Physique, Chinese, 34-48, 297- 

8, 337-8. 
Pilgrims, 266. 
Plague, 90, 109. 
Plane of living, 45-47, 80-86, 

105, 142, 287, 301. 



354 



INDEX 



Police, 4, 267. 
Politeness, 64. 
Poppy, cultivation of the, 140, 

146-151. 
Population, Chinese ideas 

about, 102. 
Population pressure, 66, 69, 74, 

110-1, 197. 
Porters, 84-5, 294, 296-7, 308. 
Poverty, 80-95, 98, 105, 287, 

301-2. 
Prayer, 92, 233, 289. 
Private rights, 268, 293. 
Progress, 54-63, 92, 303-4, 345. 
Propriety, 182-184, 201, 242, 

268. 
Protestants, 219-20, 230. 
Psychology, Chinese, ch. III. 
Public opinion, birth of, 166, 

169, 245. 
Public spirit, lack of, 22-3, 

145, 282, 293. 
Punishments, 90, 131, 156, 162, 

165-6, 188, 293-4. 

Race traits, chs. II and III. 
Railway building, 121, 125-6. 
Railways, 109, 120. 
Rearing marriage, 194, 210. 
Registration of opium smokers, 

163-4. 
Reliability, 52-3. 
Religions, 144, 218, 255. 
Resistance to magistrates, 152- 

156. 
"Rest houses," 18. 
"Rice Christians," 230. 
Rice culture, 3, 73, 77, 294-5. 
Rites, 17, 96, 235. 
River traffic, 13. 



Rivers, characteristics of, 21, 

24. 
Roads, 13, 22, 71, 78, 150, 260- 

1, 290, 293-296. 
Roman Catholics, 219-20, 230, 

236. 
Roman Empire, Christianity 

in, 257-8, 285. 

Sages, the, 57, 187, 201, 308, 

312. 
Sanitation, 48, 109. 
Scholars, 40, 233, 239, 276, 307- 

9, 318, 339. 
School apparatus, 324-5. 
School girls, 42, 179, 206-212, 

338. 
Schools, government, 321-332, 

338-9, 343. 
Schools, mission, 179, 205-211, 

245, 249, 275, 338. 
Science, natural, 249, 315, 318, 

327, 333, 343. 
Screens in church, 242. 
Septicaemia, resistance to, 35- 

39. 
Sewage-disposal, 78 1 . 
Shanghai, 117-8, 210. 
Shansi, 105-6, 117, 132, 155, 

159, 178, 261-272. 
Shensi, 106, 139, 141, 149-50, 

176, 183, 285, 322. 
Shutung, 134. 

Sianfu, 13, 117, 159, 275-280. 
Signal towers, 261. 
Silk-winding girls, 204. 
Sinecurists, 128, 131, 324. 
Sleeping, 41-2, 86, 89. 
Smallpox, 39. 
Soil exploitation, 71-77. 



INDEX 



355 



Soil waste, prevention of, 

77-8. 
Soldiers, 113-4, 155, 281, 307- 

8, 312. 
Sons, desire for, 96. 
Soochow, 219. 

South China, 12-14, 294-5. 
South Chinese, 29, 30, 36. 
Sport, indifference to, 142, 266, 

304. 
"Squeeze," 122-127, 151-2, 155- 

6, 325-332. 
"Standing frame," 293. 
Stationary stage, 70. 
Stealing, 83, 131, 267, 290. 
Stigma on manual labor, 249, 

298, 307, 336, 337. 
Streets, 3, 295. 
Struggle for existence, ch. IV, 

137, 142, 273, 285, 287, 296, 

336. 
Suicide, 52, 149, 196, 198, 201, 

204. 
Superstition, 42, 64, 70, 122, 

218-19, 288-9, 310-11, 315. 
Surgical operations, reaction to, 

34-40. 
Survival of the fittest, 33, 42, 

45-6. 
Szechuan, 89, 117, 141, 150, 

158, 160, 251, 286, 297-304. 

Taiytjanftj, 261-2. 
Tartar bannermen, 280. 
Teachers, 321-328, 338. 
Temples, 216, 218-9, 289, 321. 
Termini, 289. 
Testing bureaus, 161-2. 
Threshing, 268, 294. 
Torture, use of, 40. 



Translation, 224, 245, 323. 
Transport cost, 262, 297. 
Treaty of Tientsin, 140, 171. 
Tree growing, 22-3, 72, 289, 

296. 
Tree worship, 218. 
Tuberculosis, 41, 335. 
Tung Ho Valley, 74. 
Types, contrast of, 29, 30. 

Uppeb classes, the, 8, 27, 40, G2, 
72, 166, 178, 180, 190, 239, 
265-6. 

Utilitarianism, 91-2, 233. 



Vice, 95, 109, 172. 

Vitality of the Chinese, ch. II. 



Wages, 117-120. 

Watchmen, 311. 

Water supply, 4. 

Water wheels, 302. 

Wealthy, the, 8, 95, 265-6, 
343. 

Wei Eiver, 22. 

West River, 7, 23, 175. 

Wheat harvest, 160, 183, 
267-8. 

Windows, 7, 265, 287. 

Winds, IS. 

Wives, Chinese, 195-205, 
240-1. 

Women, 36, 39, 145; restric- 
tions on, 174-184; status of, 
187-204; revolt of, 204; 
emancipation of, 205-215. 

Wood, scarcity of, 266, 271-2. 

Wu Ting Fang, 122, 174. 



356 INDEX 

Yang and Yin, 187, 202. Yellow River, 24, 286, 310. 

Yellow, as the national color, Y. M. C. A., 309. 

21. Yunnan, 106, 141, 150. 
"Yellow peril," the, 112-117. 



THE END 



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